Dictators, Dictatorship And The African Novel: Fictions Of The State Under Neoliberalism [1st Edition] 3030665550, 9783030665555, 9783030665562

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NEW COMPARISONS IN WORLD LITERATURE

Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel Fictions of the State under Neoliberalism

Robert Spencer

New Comparisons in World Literature

Series Editors Upamanyu Pablo Mukherjee, Department of English Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK Sharae Deckard, School of English, Drama & Film Studies, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

New Comparisons in World Literature offers a fresh perspective on one of the most exciting current debates in humanities by approaching ‘world literature’ not in terms of particular kinds of reading but as a particular kind of writing. We take ‘world literature’ to be that body of writing that registers in various ways, at the levels of form and content, the historical experience of capitalist modernity. We aim to publish works that take up the challenge of understanding how literature registers both the global extension of ‘modern’ social forms and relations and the peculiar new modes of existence and experience that are engendered as a result. Our particular interest lies in studies that analyse the registration of this decisive historical process in literary consciousness and affect. Editorial Board Dr. Nicholas Brown, University of Illinois, USA Dr. Bo G. Ekelund, University of Stockholm, Sweden Dr. Dorota Kolodziejczyk, Wroclaw University, Poland Professor Paulo de Medeiros, University of Warwick, UK Dr. Robert Spencer, University of Manchester, UK Professor Imre Szeman, University of Alberta, Canada Professor Peter Hitchcock, Baruch College, USA Dr. Ericka Beckman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Dr. Sarah Brouillette, Carleton University, Canada Professor Supriya Chaudhury, Jadavpur University, India Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15067

Robert Spencer

Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel Fictions of the State under Neoliberalism

Robert Spencer English and American Studies University of Manchester Manchester, UK

ISSN 2634-6095 ISSN 2634-6109 (electronic) New Comparisons in World Literature ISBN 978-3-030-66555-5 ISBN 978-3-030-66556-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © EyeEm/Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: WM7K63 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

This book has been unconscionably long in the making. Stuff gets in the way of course. And these have been tumultuous years politically; it’s more useful to live these experiences than to write about them, as someone once said. Research also has a tendency to send you off constantly in new directions, especially when one has taken on the quixotic task of studying novels about dictatorship (of which there are of course hundreds, in all languages and in all parts of the world) and of explaining how those novels explore the world-historical processes of decolonisation and recolonisation. The good news is that I learned a huge amount, though much of that learning went into several other projects that were conceived after I started this one and completed before I finished it. Consequently the bad news, for me at least, was that this project sat on the back-burner for a few years until I realised what I actually wanted to do with it—write about African fictions of the state under neoliberalism. This study is the result. I’m most in debt to the undergraduate and postgraduate students at The University of Manchester with whom I have discussed these works in class and also to the organisers and participants of conferences and research seminars at Leicester, Pittsburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Kent where I’ve presented my ideas.

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Contents

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Introduction: The Unfinished Project of Decolonisation References

1 33

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Neoliberalism and the ‘Recolonisation’ of Africa The Origins of Dictatorship ‘Virtual Democracy’ Africa’s Unfinished Revolution ‘1968’, le debut d’une lutte prolongée Bibliography

37 40 51 57 67 82

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Performance and Power I: Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow Art at War with the State Performing the State in the Era of Structural Adjustment Wizard of the Crow and a Democracy of Readers Bibliography

89 93 102 119 136

Performance and Power II: Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote Rupture or Continuity? A Poem in Praise of the Dictator The Fetishism of Power Dictatorship ‘Goes On and On’ ‘A Praxis That Has Yet to Begin’ References

141 145 149 157 165 173 180

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viii

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CONTENTS

Allegories of Dictatorship in Nigerian Fiction: Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus Allegory as a Method of Reading Nigeria, Under-Development and the State Preparation for Praxis: Anthills of the Savannah Training for Democratic Citizenship: Purple Hibiscus Totality and Transformation Bibliography

183 184 191 196 215 233 244

Conclusion: The Counter-Counter-Revolution References

249 270

Index

273

About the author

Robert Spencer is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Criticism and Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave, 2011) and the co-author (with David Alderson) of For Humanism: Explorations in Theory and Politics (Pluto Press, 2017) and (with Anastasia Valassopoulos) of Postcolonial Locations: New Directions in Postcolonial Studies (Routledge, 2020).

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Introduction: The Unfinished Project of Decolonisation

The subject of this book is, in the words of Birahima, the child-soldiernarrator of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah Is Not Obliged (2000), ‘Africa with its barbaric dictatorships and liberticidal fathers of nations’.1 Its focus is on African fiction written in the period since the 1970s. This is the period that saw the whole of Africa finally emerge from colonial rule, a truly world-historical development, albeit one marred by both durable and original, direct as well as indirect, forms of imperialist domination in that continent. This is the age, paradoxically, of decolonisation and of what John Saul has referred to as Africa’s recolonisation.2 World history since the 1970s, the age of what would come to be known as neoliberalism, is the story of ruling elites’ efforts to combat a crisis of profitability on a global scale. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey’s indispensable ‘brief history’ of it shows, has been an effort to free capital from the constraints imposed or merely threatened by the political-economic organisation of subordinate social groups: from, for example, ‘burdensome’ taxation, from employment regulations, from political ‘interference’ in the right of capital to get a quick and easy return on investments, from environmental legislation and, most significantly of all (though this is not a point that Harvey looks at in much detail), from the desire of peoples of previously colonised territories to own and control their own resources.3

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2_1

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Neoliberalism, in Harvey’s words, is ‘a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites’, albeit one that has been realised unevenly in different parts of the globe.4 Neoliberalism in its different national incarnations was usually imposed by a combination, in varying proportions, of ideological consent (new laws brought about by elected governments appealing for the need for belt-tightening, to patriotic sentiment and state authority as well as ideologies of individual freedom) and state violence (for example, the military coups that installed the ‘Chicago Boys’ in finance ministries in Argentina and Chile or the brutal crackdowns against protests and resistance in sub-Saharan Africa).5 A variety of names, not just neoliberalism but also austerity, monetarism, Thatcherism, Reaganomics and structural adjustment, have been used to describe the policies pursued by different governments in their efforts to revive capital accumulation in this period. But whatever political rationale and whatever economic or philosophical dogma those governments have professed, it is ultimately the crude consideration of profitability and therefore the wealth and power of global ‘elites’ that has inspired those actions. Hence we would do better in my view to characterise the last forty years as the era of what Ralph Miliband called ‘class war conservativism’.6 This study looks at several African novels about dictatorship in order to think through the specifically African implications and effects of neoliberalism over the last four decades. These texts explore the continued and even intensified centrality of the authoritarian state in African societies, the purpose of which, I will claim, has been to stymie the efforts of Africa’s peoples to pioneer democratic and egalitarian alternatives to the continent’s dependent and impoverished role in the world economy. The state, in other words, operating on behalf of local ‘elites’ and imperialist powers in the first world, has contrived to hold back and even reverse the process of decolonisation. These texts dramatise, in the words of Giovanni Arrighi, Terence Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘the rise and subsidence or quiescence of national liberation as a world-historical organizing – or better, reorganizing – force’.7 These works remind readers of the continued availability and appeal of revolutionary proposals to restructure not only the economies and polities of nation states in Africa but also, as an essential aspect of that process, the entire capitalist world economy. Yet my readings of them stand or fall on the question of whether readers will be convinced that

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I have understood correctly what they are telling us about the stark and aggravating continuities in African history since the 1970s. These novels declare, with the protagonist of Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence after he is imprisoned and tortured by his country’s new regime: ‘Bastard colonial era, bastard Independence!’8 They are preoccupied, I hope to show, with the disturbing similarities between the colonial state and the ostensibly post colonial state, with the causal connection between Africa’s continuing economic underdevelopment and its political underdevelopment (between imperialism and undemocratic state structures), and, finally, with the consequent need to view the political tasks of Africa’s peoples in terms of conflict and struggle, specifically the struggle to prevail over imperialist domination, to pioneer substantive alternatives to Africa’s nations and its states in the context of a continent finally delinking itself from the capitalist world-system.  The four novels discussed in this study are the Kenyan Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006), Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote [En attendant le votes des bêtes sauvages ] (2000) by Ahmadou Kourouma of Côte d’Ivoire and two Nigerian novels—Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). How did I select these texts? My first plan was to write a study of dictator literature from all points of the globe. This quixotic and impracticable task encountered multiple obstacles, of which expertise, linguistic competence and the finite span of human life were the most insuperable.9 The second plan, to write a study only of dictator novels, that is, novels directly about the figure of the dictator, was discarded for the same reasons. A vast pile of dictator novels accumulated on my desk, including classic as well as more recent Latin American variants such as Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), his fabulous account of the centuries-long rule of an unnamed Central American tyrant; Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme (1974) about the eccentric despot Dr. José Gaspar Rodríquez de Francia who ruled over Paraguay for several decades after independence from Spain and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (2000) about the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. There was Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes (2008) about the death of Pakistan’s Zia ul-Haq, plus Somalia’s Nuruddin Farah’s formidably textured and comprehensive Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship trilogy (1979–1983). Other examples

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of African novels about dictatorship include the Ugandan Moses Isegawa’s Abyssinian Chronicles (2001) and Snakepit (2004); Hama Tuma’s The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor (1993); the Malian Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de violence (1968); the Congolese Sony Labou Tansi’s novels, especially La Vie et demie (1979), in which the ‘Providential Guide’ devours the flesh of his opponents and orders the burning of all books and films; Bode Sowande’s Our Man the President (1981), which deals with the militarised state in Nigeria in the years after the Civil War; the cycle of dictator novels written by the Congolese Pius Ngandu Nkashama, such as Le Pacte de sang (1984) and Un Jour de grand soleil sur les montagnes en Ethiopie (1991); the Malian Doumbi-Fakoly’s La Retraite anticipée du Guide Suprème (1984); and the Guinean Tierno Monenembo’s L’Aîné des orphelins (2000). What all these books, in addition to numerous other familiar and less familiar novels from all corners of the globe about dictators or set in dictatorships, taught me was that the monopolisation of political and economic power is, firstly, a lasting global phenomenon unrestricted to any particular region or period and, secondly, that dictatorship is a peculiarly compelling subject for novelists. The first point is one that this introduction will return to in order to explain my focus on the era of ‘class war conservatism’. The second requires an immediate gloss. I do not think that there is any intrinsic reason why novels and novelists should be antipathetic to dictatorial power. Novelists seem to be as seduced by the dubious glamour of dictatorship quite as often as they are compelled to expose and denounce dictators. Daniel Kalder’s somewhat crude but enjoyable study of Dictator Literature: A History of Despots Through Their Writing informs us that Benito Mussolini, Muammar Gaddafi, General Franco and Saddam Hussein all actually wrote novels. Virtually all dictators, Kalder’s book reminds us, from Stalin to Mobutu and Hoxha to Mugabe, are compelled to exude veritable torrents of forgettable and dogmatic prose. These now pulped or ignored mountains of collected speeches and theoretical verbiage might be considered gargantuan efforts, produced by despots and their armies of ghost writers, efforts with which novelists would perhaps sympathise, to wish or imagine their ideal kingdoms into being.10 Dictators sometimes write novels, while novelists can be dictators, ruthlessly dedicating their work to some monologic personal vision. Nonetheless, I want to maintain that there frequently is a tension between dictatorship and the novel or at least between the demand of

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dictatorships to monopolise power and to drown out other voices and the capacity of the novels that I will be reading, at the levels of their content and form, to amplify those voices and thus expose the dictator’s power to other perspectives and projects. Jean-Paul Sartre was undoubtedly correct that ‘nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism’.11 Nor could anybody suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of dictatorship. A bad one certainly, but for a novel to be ‘good’, which is to say for a novel to be interesting and invigorating, it must at least explore and ask questions about its theme by examining it from different angles and viewpoints, which is precisely what anti-Semites and dictators cannot do. ‘To speak of authority in narrative prose fiction’, in Edward Said’s invaluable dictum, ‘is also inevitably to speak of the molestations that accompany it’.12 The authority of narrators is invariably beset by their manifest partiality and that of characters by the events of the narrative plus the voices of other characters, while the authority of the novelist is always hedged by the imaginary nature of the world she or he conjures for us. This study is not really interested in what W.H. Auden famously dismissed as ‘the elderly rubbish’ that dictators talk.13 But it is interested in the capacity of the novel form to dispute the dictator’s ownership of language, to thereby context his authority or power and in the process to envision democratic structures and institutions. This book will both complement and try to extend the conclusions of the two existing studies in the field, G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı’s stimulating edited volume Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature and Cécile Bishop’s closely argued Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship. I should stress at the outset that I do not share the view expressed by many of Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı’s contributors (and explicitly in Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı’s own editorial line) that dictatorship in Africa is essentially a thing of the past. Unmasking the African Dictator tends to present dictatorial systems too flatteringly, as fastvanishing relics of Africa’s colonial past rather than durable features of its ostensibly postcolonial present. The ‘postcolony’ emerges from such studies as being in the main symbolically (rather than physically) oppressive and as being already (rather than potentially) subverted by other social groups and political projects. As I see it, the major flaw of much of the existing work on the theme of dictatorship in African fiction, a consequence in part of its enthusiastic use of Achille Mbembe’s work on the ‘postcolony’. I have been taken to

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task by Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı for reaching, in a previously published prolegomenon to this longer study of novels about dictatorship, ‘a new extreme’ in the rejection of Mbembe’s influential work on the ‘postcolony’.14 Several of the contributors to Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı’s volume of essays on African novels about dictatorship make use of Mbembe’s oft-cited and broadly Foucauldian work on autocratic power and performance. I have not done so, despite, as Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı points out, the way in which I read ‘power as a performance’ (‘a core argument in Mbembe’, as he observes) and despite my stress, like Mbembe’s, on ‘the continuities between colonial and the postcolonial dispensations’. There the similarity ends however, for I am convinced, in a way that Mbembe and those critics reliant on his ideas do not appear to be, that power is far from being only or even chiefly a matter of performance. I also remain convinced that the substantive subversion and overthrow of systems of power therefore demands much more than a simple re-performance of power by symbolic and cultural practices of various kinds. By exaggerating the performative nature of power Mbembe’s work strikes me, as it has struck Neil Lazarus, as a way of disembodying or ‘de-actualising’ violence.15 In my view Mbembe’s work also obscures the origins of violence in state power, in the social and economic interests of Africa’s ruling groups and in imperialism itself. This is what Mbembe says about ‘conflict’ in the postcolony: Conflict arises from the fact that the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic, and that it is in practice impossible to create a single, permanently stable system out of all the signs, images, and markers current in the postcolony; that is why they are constantly being shaped and reshaped, as much by the rulers as by the ruled, in attempts to rewrite the mythologies of power.16

I too, as Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı observes, seek to stress the ways in which power is reperformed by Ngugi’s and Kourouma’s novels. But we are talking about novels here, not about the postcolony itself. My argument tries to stress the considerable limitations to the process that Mbembe describes whereby power is ‘chaotically’ and ‘convivially’ dispersed. For Mbembe radical political alternatives are hardly even necessary because for him the ‘postcolony’ is already a pluralistic place in which power is ‘negotiated’, dispersed, ‘multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation’.17 Brady Smith has argued, in the by now familiar Mbembe-esque vein, that ‘[a]t work throughout’ Wizard of the Crow ‘is what Mbembe describes as a powerful conviviality between the Ruler and the ruled’.18 Yet, as we

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shall see, the state in Wizard of the Crow and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is not quite ‘convivial’ enough to stop torturing and slaughtering its subjects. In fact the relationship it maintains with its subjects looks like nothing so much as an old-fashioned ‘binary’ that cannot be deconstructed or conjured away by theoretical trickery. Mbembe tells us he does not view the postcolony through ‘the binary categories in standard interpretations of domination’ such as ‘autonomy vs. subjection’ or ‘hegemony vs. counter-hegemony’; such oppositional models of conflict apparently ‘cloud our understanding of postcolonial relations’.19 This passage is, for Jeremy Weate’s very thorough critical account of it, ‘the central moment of Mbembe’s thinking: that African lived experience is a messy intertwining of ruler and ruled, oppressed and oppressor, executed and executioner; a nonlinear controlled chaos that resists Western Manichean modes of analysis’.20 ‘What is elided in this move’, Weate explains, ‘is an acceptance that power relations may, on an existential level, be complex and messy (or “convivial”) at the same time as underlying forces of resistance and domination may still operate’.21 Or might operate in ways that are out in the open and quite blatant and should therefore not be obfuscated by rhetoric about how power has been somehow negotiated and dispersed. In other words, as Weate goes on to argue very cogently, terms like ‘play’ and ‘fluidity’, let alone ‘inversion’ and ‘transformation’, have little value or meaning unless they are seen as part of a movement ‘of resistance to the domination of the power of the state’.22 A recent special issue of the journal Research in African Literatures on ‘performances of sovereignty in African dictator-fiction’ demonstrates the pressing need to heed dictator-fiction’s own theorisations of state power. Charlotte Baker’s introduction rightly focuses on ‘the role of writers of fiction in revealing and questioning’ the ‘legitimizing violence’ of the state.23 But her attempt to theorise the authoritarian state in the ‘postcolony’ feels less convincing, even contradictory. The state appears as both a fearsomely ‘necropolitical’ or totalitarian Leviathan theorised with the aid of Giorgio Agamben’s Carl Schmitt-inspired image of the death-dealing sovereign and a ‘convivial’ entity whose power is ceaselessly dispersed and broken up. It surely can’t be both. My own sense is that we can move away from these often confusing and abstract theorisations of the state. It might be better to attend carefully to what dictator-fictions, as Baker calls them, tell us about how state power is actually struggled over and how state power is articulated in different ways depending on the balance

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of powers that contest it. Thus Hannah Grayson’s marvellous article on the Guinean novelist Tierno Monénembo criticises Mbembe for underestimating the possibilities of resistance in the postcolony. Baker’s own compelling article on three novels by Norbert Zongo, Loro Mazono and Patrick Ilboudo shows how they traffic between the aesthetic and the political in order to contest the apparent impunity of the authoritarian regime of Blaise Campaoré in Burkina Faso. What Mbembe’s picture leaves out is what Ng˜ ug˜ı, Kourouma, Achebe and Adichie endeavour to place at the very centre of their different portraits of the dictatorial ‘postcolony’: the grievously unequal relations of (actual and not merely symbolic) force between the postcolony’s people on the one hand and, on the other, its unscrupulous ruling groups empowered and underwritten by the unremittingly imperialist world system. Perhaps that is just an example of what Mbembe calls ‘uncritical Marxist moral-political-economic evangelism’,24 though I confess I don’t know what he means by that. I have in fact found Marxist theory to be indispensable, firstly in trying to understand the integral relationship between capitalism and imperialism especially in the context of Africa’s still dependent role in the world economy, secondly in grasping the link between authoritarian state structures and class power, and thirdly in exploring the ways works of fiction can dramatise and clarify these political and economic struggles for us. The present study is concerned with the continuities in African history since independence. Dictatorial state structures and concentrated forms of economic power are not problems that have been overcome or that could be overcome without a concerted effort to overhaul the imperialist structures of world capitalism in which Africa has now been thoroughly enmeshed for well over a century. This study addresses the dictatorial political and economic structures inherited by African states from the colonial period. It reminds readers of the triumphs and setbacks of the initial years of independence. It focuses on of the subsequent ‘recolonization’ of Africa from the 1980s, especially through the austerity policies inflicted by the regime of ‘structural adjustment’ overseen by the global financial institutions the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The study pays attention to the austerity protests and the putative ‘second liberation’ of democratic reform in the 1990s as well as the rise of political radicalism across the continent in recent years. But it also stresses the long and far from concluded struggles to extend democratisation so that the concentration of economic power and extremely low standards of living in postcolonial

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Africa might finally be corrected. Its focus, in short, is on a dictatorial political and economic system that was inherited by postcolonial Africa, that has since morphed and adapted but that, while it has been repeatedly contested and assailed, has not yet been replaced. The objective of this study is to assert the potential and the crying need for, but also, alas, the continued absence of, substantive democratic-egalitarian transformation in postcolonial Africa. Dictatorship will be understood therefore as another word for the concentration of political and economic power, which is of course not only a problem in postcolonial Africa but is certainly a very profound and ongoing problem there. Dictatorship is not a problem of the past. It is not a problem that only affects Africans. It is the result of an economic system that attaches supreme importance to the accumulation of capital at the expense of the popular determination of social and economic priorities in accordance with human need. Dictatorship has not been overcome and will not be overcome unless and until a ‘third liberation’ finally succeeds in overthrowing political and economic imperialism in Africa. Yet this is not primarily a study in politics or economics but a work of literary criticism. That is because I am convinced, like Cécile Bishop, that representations of dictatorship are not only ‘documentary sources’ of information but also valuable forms of ‘aesthetic experience’ that aid in the essentially political work of criticising dictatorship.25 Bishop, however, like Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, does not share the view that this study maintains (and the novels I analyse repeatedly insist upon) that dictatorship is a durable reality in contemporary Africa. Moreover, her account of the ‘aesthetic experience’ of African dictatorship is somewhat different to mine. Bishop discusses how, for example, Henri Lopes’s novel Le pleurer-rire and Barbet Schroeder’s filmic ‘autoportrait’ of Idi Amin dramatise dictatorship in challengingly multiple and often contradictory ways. The objective of her study is to show that, since political condemnations of African dictatorship often succumb to ‘colonial clichés’ about African primitivism, the most effective strategy for novelists and filmmakers is to occupy and ironise those clichés. In the process, Bishop argues, their work demands a self-critical ‘aesthetic’ response from readers and audiences that questions and revises those clichés. I share this faith in the indirectly political effects of aesthetic representations of African dictatorship. My emphasis too is on the multiple ways in which my novels undermine prevalent stereotypes about dictatorship, for example by revealing dictatorship to be not a peculiarly African malediction but a consequence of an unremittingly imperialist global

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system. I seek to go further and argue that in a variety of ways these novels help to formulate and even envision or anticipate a substantive democratic alternative to this system. Michael K. Walonen’s superb study of Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism ‘seeks to situate contemporary American writing in terms of the broader world literature occasioned by neoliberalism’.26 My own aim is to show how several works of African fiction written during and about the epoch of neoliberalism, by focussing readers’ attention on the role of the dictatorial state in imposing this project, also indicate democratic alternatives to neoliberalism. We should associate those alternatives with the original goals of anti-colonial liberation. I cannot deny therefore, that at the forefront of my argument about these novels are terms such as struggle and system, terms that often play second fiddle in postcolonial studies to the less forthright idiom of ambivalence, liminality and hybridisation. But I have done my best to construct an argument, as it were, out of these texts and therefore to listen carefully to the ways in which they present postcolonial African history and its various predicaments and political dilemmas. For the life of me, I cannot find in them the kind of ‘contingency’ and ‘conflictedness’ that Raphael Dalleo claims to find in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow.27 Truly, if the magnum opus of even that famously unreconstructed Marxist and anti-imperialist militant can be deprived of its ‘radical oppositionality’28 then nobody is safe from the assimilative ideology of postcolonial ‘hybridisation’! These are works are not ‘conflicted’ about the continued imperialist domination of Africa. Indeed one of my main claims is that these novels help us to think through the nature and shape of the alternatives. The deplorable continuity between the colonial and postcolonial periods is the distinguishing trope of many novels about African dictatorship. Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland, to cite a well-known example, which as Oliver Lovesey’s astute reading contends ‘is a kind of latter-day Heart of Darkness ’, dramatises the guilt and self-delusions of its narrator, the Scottish doctor Nicholas Garrigan, who finds himself drawn into complicity with the atrocious regime of Uganda’s Idi Amin.29 Just as Heart of Darkness closes with Conrad’s narrator Marlow concealing Kurtz’s depredations in the Congo from Kurtz’s Intended back home in the ‘sepulchral city’ of Brussels and increasingly from himself, so the evasive Garrigan looks back on his tenure as Amin’s private physician and

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amanuensis with at best an incomplete understanding of his own culpability in the dictator’s vicious reign. ‘The narrator conjures his memories of Amin as if he were talking to or interrogating himself about his own responsibility’.30 It thus gradually dawns on the reader that not only credulous sojourners like Garrigan but an entire durable system made up of the government bureaucracy, the foreign press and especially the former colonial power itself and its continuing machinations (Lieutenant Amin of the King’s African Rifles being initially ‘one of our own’, in the words of the British diplomat Nigel Stone31 ) must be held accountable for Amin’s appalling misdeeds. The avoidance of culpability in such atrocities is what Conrad’s novel portrays and denounces. It is a fault of which Foden’s novel seeks to cure it own readers, we casual ‘Western’ onlookers for whom, like our stand-in Garrigan, Africa is usually nothing but a distant and exotic, if sometimes ghoulish, source of vicarious excitement. What is crucial to add to such readings, however, is the insight that novels may also provide images of opposition to state power and may even give rise to forms of awareness and perception as well as practices of participation and deliberation. In exploring, frequently at the level of their forms, what democratic alternatives to dictatorship might look like, these texts provide further evidence for the Marxist tradition’s faith in literature’s ‘utopian’ potential.32 One of the main claims made by the present study’s readings of these novels is that in their different ways they extol the subversive power of writing in general and demonstrate the democratic potentials of the novel form in particular. That could be said not just about these African texts but about many other texts about political power from various times and locations as well. Raymond Williams’ objection to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, that it communicates ‘an extreme of inhuman terror’33 and thus offers ‘no hope at all’,34 has always struck me as a particularly crude and for that reason uncharacteristic sort of reproach, even a kind of category error. Of course it is true that this extremely familiar text, which is in many ways a sort of Ur-dictator novel of the mid-twentieth century from which its epigones endlessly mine images and themes (though it is in fact set in something more like a nightmarishly perfected totalitarian system rather than a ‘mere’ dictatorship), is unlikely to raise the spirits of the ingenuous reader who goes to it hoping to hear some optimistic advice about the chances of progressive political change. But since emotional uplift is not usually the purpose of novels and is not always among their effects what one can say about Nineteen Eighty-Four is that, like all the works I shall be discussing, it

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makes available for readers’ scrutiny the complex phenomenon of dictatorship, including dictatorship’s origins, its effects and even (though very tentatively) the shape of the potential alternatives. In other words Nineteen Eighty-Four is not a political tract or testament but a novel, a tragedy in the strict sense, one that contrasts Winston Smith’s inevitable doom at the hands of the all-seeing Party with his and the novel’s equally compelling devotion to such auspicious things as memory, truth, education, empathy, erotic desire, the imaginative power of dreams, tradition, nature, literary creativity (emblematised, as in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, by ‘Shakespeare’) and the capacities of unrestrained thought: everything, in short, that the novel refrains from spelling out at length or pinning its political hopes on too securely. Winston clings to ‘a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to’,35 a ‘mute protest in your own bones’ (1984, 84), an ‘inarticulate horror’ (1984, 308) and, still less convincing, his confidence in this cliché being swiftly refuted when his interrogator O’Brien yanks out one of Winston’s rotten teeth, the ‘spirit of Man’ (1984, 309). Whatever ‘hope’ there is to be found in this book lies not, as it were, between its pages, for Winston of course is tortured, defeated and shot, let alone in the proles, but in readers’ active engagement with the novel’s diverse and sometimes clashing meanings. The best we can say about them, and this is not a negligible thing, is that texts like Orwell’s that take dictatorship of some kind as their explicit theme thus potentially help to induce outside the text a greater attachment in their readers to democratic practices of critique and deliberation, regardless of what happens inside the texts, as it were, at the level of plot, and regardless of the commitments and biases of their authors. Airstrip One’s novel-writing machines manipulate responses while Newspeak famously seeks to make independent thought impossible by destroying and simplifying words and by thus depriving them of their range and eloquence. By contrast Nineteen Eighty-Four, like the later dictator novels of Ng˜ ug˜ı, Kourouma, Achebe and Adichie in which the struggle against dictatorial power is resumed time and again, seeks to galvanise subversive thought and action. Hence its most memorable and pathetic image, of Winston ducking beneath the prying gaze of the Thought Police in order to commit his illicit thoughts to a leather-bound diary and an uncertain future.

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I have nearly arrived at an answer to my earlier question about why I selected these novels from among the many other texts about dictatorship. One of those formally and generically very diverse texts, Ismail Kadare’s The Successor (2003), evokes the conspiratorial manoeuvrings in the last days of Albania’s Stalinist tyrant Enver Hoxha in the form of a thriller. Patrick McGuiness does the opposite in The Last Hundred Days (2011), conjuring a series of figurative and impressionistic scenes to chronicle the sheer tedium and moribundity of the Ceausescus’ ailing despotism in Romania. Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin (Jeder stirbt für sich allein) (1947) explores the sobering contrast between the terrifying power of the Nazi dictatorship and the heroic but ultimately trifling acts of subversion represented by the pathetically misspelt postcards left in stairwells and mailboxes by the working-class malcontents Otto and Elise Hampel. Their powerful sense of the sheer strength and durability of dictatorship does not mean that these novels aren’t committed to the possibility of democratic transformations. A kind of tentative and circuitous rather than explicit or prescriptive commitment to political change is a distinguishing feature of the novels examined in this study. They combat the ‘colossus’ of dictatorship with the inkling that ‘Men at some time are masters of their fates’, as Cassius puts it in Julius Caesar, which when you think about it is a kind of dictator play.36 For this reason it is no exaggeration to call such novels utopian, in the specific and non-pejorative sense of that word used by the tradition of Marxist literary criticism for which this striking adjective denotes art’s capacity to explore images of a future society beyond the injustices of class rule. What this book endeavours to demonstrate is that authoritarian states in Africa have, during the colonial period and subsequently, been brought into being precisely in order to serve the wider requirements of the capitalist world-system. It is the system that is dictatorial, local tyrannies being merely its epiphenomena. Axiomatic for me is the belief that continuing economic and political underdevelopment in much of Africa result from the peculiarities of the continent’s insertion into the capitalist worldsystem under colonialism. But rather than talk vaguely about ‘the system’, I will try to provide a much more detailed account of the way in which a profound crisis of profitability in global capitalism in the 1970s led, among other things, to the concerted ‘recolonization’ of Africa in this period. It is the aim of this study to explain as meticulously as possible both why what the political economist Giovanni Arrighi calls the ‘US-led capitalist counter-offensive of the late 1970s and early 1980s’37 (that I’m

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referring to as neoliberalism or ‘class war conservatism’) is chiefly responsible for the prevalence and durability of dictatorship in postcolonial Africa and how several African novels about dictatorship draw our attention to this state of affairs and sketch alternatives to it. That is why these texts were chosen. They reward detailed scrutiny at the levels of their themes and forms of the clash between dictatorship (which is the legacy and guarantor of colonial power relations) and democracy (which is the comprehensive and utopian alternative to this regrettably persistent state of affairs), a struggle that has as its background the world-historical processes of decolonisation and recolonisation. Substantive democracy in the political and economic spheres was, as we shall see, the deepest aspiration of the only partially (or only initially) successful revolutions against the exploitative and tyrannical system of European colonial rule. Since that system continues therefore (albeit in sometimes more indirect though often no less coercive forms), it is little wonder that postcolonial African fiction remains a medium for the exploration and advocacy of democracy. Democracy is the principle of resistance to political systems that ensure the monopolisation of power in order to ensure the monopolisation of wealth.  When I have talked at conferences and symposiums about dictatorships or authoritarian state structures in postcolonial Africa I have more than once been accused of overlooking the considerable differences (political, economic, cultural, etc.) between African states and between different parts of the continent. Readers of the book will judge for themselves whether my readings of these texts have adequately stressed the specificities of the contexts that they dramatise for us. Axiomatic for me, as a European critic of African literature, is Chinua Achebe’s injunction to ‘cultivate the habit of humility appropriate to [my] limited experience of the African world’, so that one might try to be ‘purged of the superiority and arrogance which history so insidiously makes [me] heir to’.38 And yet it is true that my account of postcolonial African history in Chapter 2 stresses not the distinctive circumstances of particular nation states but the general circumstances of the continent as a whole. My subject is Africa, in short, especially sub-Saharan Africa, not this or that part of Africa. I trust, or rather fervently hope, that this is not because I am incorrigibly Eurocentric. I do not think that Africa is a homogeneous place. I don’t

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think, like Sarah Palin, that Africa is a single country. Nor do I think that Africa’s peoples are somehow lacking in what is usually called ‘agency’, by which is meant something like will, volition and the collective intelligence and creativity required to study and resolve political and economic problems of various kinds. I do admit to thinking, however, that since the nineteenth century imperialism has beset Africa, the whole continent and not just parts of it, with a force and a pertinacity that have been, and still are, very difficult for Africa’s peoples to withstand. So when it comes to postcolonial African history it is the continuities and similarities as much as the discontinuities and dissimilarities that I have stressed. There have of course been considerable variations and transformations in African societies since independence. Apart from the obvious cultural, linguistic and geographical divergences, Africa’s new states have set up any number of different institutional arrangements and have had any number of different ideological complexions. But they all faced similar challenges. Freedom from colonial rule was almost everywhere the result of alliances made during the struggle between some combination of urban working classes, peasantries, landlords and emergent elites in the professions and civil service. Thereafter the new states tended to combine social hierarchy with a degree of welfarism and state-directed development, no matter whether they were allies of the West during the Cold War or socialist regimes of one kind or another, authoritarian regimes or ones with more representative forms of government. These kinds of class compromise became much less feasible with the onset of debt crises and IMF-dictated restructurings in the late 1970s and with the general economic downturn in that period that adversely affected commodity prices, government revenues and so on. This period saw what Vijay Prashad bluntly calls the ‘assassination’ of the ‘Third World project’ as those states and their dominant classes withdrew from their roles in fostering development, abandoned their actual or by now merely rhetorical commitments to socialist ideals and gave up on their attempts to remake the international economic order.39 Whereas before they had endeavoured to combine their own privileges with a marginal commitment to the welfare of the poor, they now dedicated themselves principally to the former objective. So the state began to retreat behind its function as a device for enriching dominant classes, as it did not just in Africa but across the world during this period. The continuities and commonalities rather than the transformations and variations in African history during the period since independence

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are therefore what this study emphasises. Everywhere one looks there are disempowered social classes and a shortage of decent employment, housing, education and healthcare. Decades after decolonisation, nearly half of all Africans live in extreme poverty.40 It would simply be wrong—empirically and verifiably incorrect —to state that, even after the democratising wave of the 1990s, the various polities and economies that make up the continent of Africa are subject to popular control or that the proceeds of economic development are trickling downwards. Even those states that are richest in resources are frequently the most impoverished because the democratic institutions that should enable accumulated capital to be reinvested in social and economic infrastructure, health care and education as opposed to being spirited away by foreign firms and local ‘elites’ are simply too weak. I am painting an unapologetically totalising picture of Africa after independence. But the agent of generalisation in my argument is not the category ‘Africa’. Refusing to use that category in favour of an emphasis on local particularities bars us, as James Ferguson has argued in his Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, from ‘certain ways of thinking about a continental predicament’.41 Despite their undeniable particularity, individual African states and even individual African lives cannot be understood without analysing the general context brought into being by powerful agents and institutions. So Ferguson defends his use of the ‘megacategory’ ‘Africa’ on the grounds that ‘even the most “local” of lives unfold within the terms of real and imagined categories and institutions operating at a range of supra-local scales’.42 As Graham Harrison argues, ‘the coherence of Africa derives mainly from its political and discursive [and, I would add, economic] construction’.43 From the massively powerful viewpoint of capital, Africa ‘is not so much a system of states’, in John Saul’s words, ‘still less a continent of people in need of a better life, as simply a geographic – or geological – terrain, offering this or that opportunity to make money’.44 Obviously for Saul the power of capital is to be regretted, in fact resisted and hopefully overthrown, but it undoubtedly exists and thus has profound and usually deleterious effects that need to be acknowledged and thought through. To talk about Africa then, as I propose to do in this study, is not to do anything so idiotic as identify an essence of ‘Africanness’ or to suggest that all of Africa (and all Africans) are somehow the same. I want rather to think about how the continent has been constructed by both internal and often, alas in extremely damaging ways, external actors. Neoliberalism

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and all the other forms of imperialist domination that came before it have treated Africa as a single entity to which a repertoire of common practices and ‘solutions’ could be applied; as a result, it is now an entity with a common set of problems and challenges. It is true that the ‘megacategory’ in question conceals the important differences that go to make up the totalising image of ‘Africa’. But since that is what all nouns do and since ‘Africa’ at least encourages us to attend to recurrent features of the continent’s different states and peoples, I will use the term. It is not a normative but a descriptive category. By talking about ‘Africa’, then, one is trying to do nothing more than make out the trees and the wood. I maintain that any sketch of the different manifestations of undemocratic power in Africa, of the different forms in which that power has been dramatised by Africa’s writers and of the different and varyingly successful modes of resistance undertaken by Africa’s peoples should be combined with an equally forceful emphasis on what these manifestations, forms and modes have in common: the overbearing and insistent context of colonialism and neo-colonialism, the real agents of generalisation. When it comes to postcolonial Africa, to adapt a maxim of Fredric Jameson’s, one cannot not generalise.45 ‘To generalize means to think’, as Hegel put it: to place the isolated, apparently discrete phenomena of history and geography into the larger context that shapes them.46 One of the most important lessons of Jameson’s work, which the chapter on Achebe and Adichie seeks to restate and pay heed to, is that cultural criticism, without determined attempts to think the totality of social, economic and political relations in which texts are involved, ‘falls back into a view of present history’, or in this case the history of postcolonial Africa, ‘as sheer heterogeneity, random difference, a coexistence of a host of distinct forces whose effectivity is undecidable’.47 The history of postcolonial Africa, beset unrelentingly by capitalist imperialism, does not present us with such a vision. My emphasis on the durable and determining influence of imperialism in postcolonial Africa is certainly not intended, then, to scant the ‘agency’ of social groups and political movements in Africa. To the contrary, I want to understand and help fight the nefarious forces that currently constrain that agency. We should treat with undisguised contempt the prevalent idea that Africa is an object of pity to be set back on its feet by philanthropic Western leaders, NGOs and others. Harry Browne has written powerfully about the harmful role played by first-world celebrities in Western policy towards Africa. Bono and others compound the

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idea that Africa is a helpless object of charity and that Western elites are essentially benign. ‘I truly try to tread carefully as I walk over the dreams of dignity under my feet in our work for the terrible beauty that is the continent of Africa’, Bono has opined.48 Leaving aside its pompous and nonsensical Yeats mash-up, this is language informed, despite its best efforts, by a missionary understanding of the underdeveloped world. It constructs that world as, in Browne’s words, ‘a task for the rich world to complete’.49 This tiresome popinjay’s narcissistic ‘campaigning’ and the stingy, strings-attached handouts it inveigles from presidents and plutocrats makes genuine structural reform of an unequal world-system less rather than more likely. It holds in contempt the political agency of poor Africans and covers those rapacious and self-serving elites in a patina of humanitarian concern. Witness also Paul Collier’s disapproving homilies about African ‘governance’, as though Africa’s problems were all of its own making and as if all it needed to do better is to try harder and to listen more attentively to Western leaders’ sermons. Collier opines that, ‘with hard work, thrift and intelligence, a society can gradually climb out of poverty’.50 According to this advice, since no sub-Saharan economy has managed to haul a majority of its people out of poverty since independence then the fault, as Sir Paul sees it, must be something to do with Africans’ congenital shortcomings. The problem is that they are just not like us ! Not resourceful enough or, God help us, thrifty or hard-working enough! What masquerades as a hard-headed voluntarism that places the onus squarely on Africans to pull up their own socks is in fact the purest condescension. I would say something similar about the gloating pleasure that many commentators struggle to suppress when reviewing Africa’s difficulties in the postcolonial period, its wars, dictatorships and crises being seen as a just (or at least inevitable) reward for the folly of spurning Western tutelage. The truth of course is that independence is non-negotiable. Independence brought considerable gains for Africans, as Neil Lazarus implores us to acknowledge.51 Schools and hospitals were built, homeless people were given housing, child death rates fell, land was redistributed and the illiterate were taught to write and to read. Less tangible but nonetheless permanent and incontrovertible advances were made in restoring the human dignity of peoples previously held down by force. Nobody could refasten the yoke of colonial rule, the throwing off of which, though this is sometimes forgotten, was a heroic and truly worldhistorical achievement. A central premise of these reflections is the belief

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that Africans have not had enough independence and their relations with the rest of the world have not yet been conducted on terms of their own choosing. Africa’s peoples continue to struggle against the state of political and economic underdevelopment inflicted by colonialism on the continent. There is no need to dub Africa a cursed ‘dictatorland’.52 Africa is an extremely heterogeneous place whose future remains to be written. The real generalisers are its enemies, the Western governments and multinationals who have inflicted a general condition of underdevelopment on the continent and who deny its people’s ability to invent ways of escaping this condition. So by emphasising the tenacity of imperialism in postcolonial Africa I am not forgetting the reality of Africa’s diversity or Africans’ agency or their continuing political struggles against imperialism. Joe Trapido has shown just how unwise it is to stress the ‘agency’ of African states and peoples while downplaying imperialism’s continuing presence in the continent. Imperialism, he shows, is largely to blame for the ongoing human catastrophe in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is by no means unusual in this respect. The DRC thus makes an instructive case study of the very tight, and often fatal, constraints placed by an unremittingly imperialist world-system on liberationist projects in postcolonial Africa. As is well known, the radical government of Patrice Lumumba was rapidly done away with after independence in 1960 by an effective conspiracy of Western states and corporations. That country tells us a great deal about the large share of the blame that must be shouldered by those corporations and states for the vile regimes that have typically risen to power in the wake of such defeats and therefore for the unremitting larceny and immiseration that have befallen countries like the DRC in the decades since they won their nominal freedom. There are two standard explanations for sub-Saharan Africa’s postcolonial travails, Trapido reminds us, each of them false, although some variation or combination of them is always heard whenever it is felt necessary to assert that Africa’s problems are all, as it were, ‘made at home’. The first theory contends that the restrictions imposed on markets by overweening and protectionist governments had hindered economic growth in postcolonial Africa in the immediate aftermath of independence. This was the influential thesis of the World Bank’s 1981 Berg report on Accelerated Development in Sub-Saharan Africa that sought to provide a justification for the disastrous ‘shock therapy’ of ‘structural adjustment’. Essential loans were made available to many African states in

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exchange for currency devaluations, budget austerities and the removal of barriers to foreign investment, in effect for the withdrawal of those states from any sort of developmental role. The low and sometimes negative rates of growth as well as the ballooning inequalities that resulted, not to mention the profound human misery and the increased state repression of trade unions, women’s groups and student protestors, only compounded the dependency and underdevelopment that bedevilled those states, as we shall see in much more detail in Chapter 2. The second most commonly heard explanation for Africa’s continuing underdevelopment is that ruling-class corruption, nepotism and clientelism (often referred to as patrimonialism or sometimes neopatrimonialism) dissipate resources that might otherwise be employed for investment and autonomous economic development. That has been the explanation for Africa’s travails put forward by Western governments and international financial institutions since their adoption of the so-called ‘good governance agenda’ in the 1990s. The idea here is that investment, loans and debt forgiveness should be conditional on the adoption of the rule of law and democratic political structures, which will prevent corrupt elites in Africa from filching the meagre surpluses generated by their economies. What sounds good in theory has usually failed to work in practice however, because the vast majority of the filching (or surplus absorption, to use a more technical term) is in fact done by or at the behest of Western multinationals whose increased presence in Africa these deals are trying to engineer. These two explanations ‘go hand-in-hand’, Trapido explains, ‘with a marked shift in African studies away from explanations that favour “dependency” and towards those that emphasize “agency”’.53 Trapido’s point, which is an extremely important one, is that local agency, which undoubtedly exists of course (for how could it not?), should not be highlighted in ways that distract attention from the continuing centrality of imperialism and capitalism and of the international state system through which imperialism and capitalism operate. Thus Trapido argues that the forcible way in which the DRC was originally assimilated into the world economy has inhibited, indeed actively thwarted, local capital formation and political development; a state that is weak in everything but its coercive power, and can now barely manage that, has enabled the nation’s wealth to disappear abroad (ALG, 9). So whatever name it has gone under, the DRC has been a place in which exploitation has been directed from outside and in which,

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therefore, by far the largest share of the blame for the evacuation (as opposed to the reinvestment) of that nation’s wealth must be shouldered by external rather than internal ‘agents’. The prosperity of precolonial ruling classes was dependent on the export of the territory’s major means of production: human beings. Likewise in the era of colonial rule, the ‘Congo Free State’ made fast and vast profits through the genocidal extraction of commodities, chiefly ivory and rubber. In the years immediately after independence, Belgium and the United States (with the collusion of the UN) moved swiftly to overthrow the new government lest it demand a better deal from Belgian and British-owned mining interests. This pattern changed little in the Mobutu era. Indeed if we are to describe that despicable regime’s depredations at all accurately then the term ‘capital flight’ should in this instance be replaced by something like ‘capital teleportation’, so speedily and comprehensively were the nation’s remaining resources pilfered by the regime and its Western accomplices. And so on to the post-Mobutu period, in which the big profits from the exploitation of Congolese minerals have gone not just to venal state functionaries (who make a tidy sum from mining concessions) but variously to the foreign bank accounts of local ‘entrepreneurs’, to the invading armies of Rwanda and Uganda and to the pockets of Western mining giants. In the DRC a ‘great river of money’ is still ‘sweeping out to sea, just as in the past, leaving nothing in its wake’ (ALG, 34). Therefore the catastrophe in that country, Trapido adds, including its people’s pitiful life expectancy, the collapse of GDP, much of the country’s consequent reversion to a sort of pre-capitalist mode of production, not to mention the eight-year international war in which over four million people perished, emerges ‘not as sui generis, but as an extreme variant of a wider pattern of financial mise-en-dépendance’ (ALG, 18) in postcolonial Africa. Truly, once this history is surveyed then ‘[d]enying the “agency” of powerful outsiders [appears] even more implausible than denying it to powerful Africans’ (ALG, 8). ‘Africa’s future is up to Africans’, as Barack Obama told the Ghanaian House of Representatives in 2009, which is true as far as it goes, though Obama’s speech did not address what Tunde Zack-Williams and Graham Harrison call ‘the dialectical insertion’ of Africa’s political and economic ‘formations within the global capitalist system, which structurally impel African under-development and the need for collective African responses’.54 How much more agency might Africans exert if those collective responses were able to take that system’s hands from

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Africa’s throat? For example, Obama criticised many African economies’ dependence on single export commodities, though as Zack-Williams and Harrison point out and as we shall see in the first chapter this was precisely the prescription of the structural adjustment measures imposed by the global financial institutions in the 1980s and 1990s; subsequent gluts in the world market led to a calamitous fall in commodity prices. Facile affirmations of African ‘agency’ are wont to overlook such constraints. Notwithstanding their significant differences of form and context and despite their tantalising investments in the possibility of political change, what these novels about dictatorship point to with the utmost insistence is the sheer extensiveness and durability of imperialist relations of power in postcolonial Africa. To obscure that difficult fact behind truisms about Africa’s diversity, or even worse, to fudge it with hand-washing evasions about a still-tyrannised continent’s ‘agency’ is, in my view, a dereliction of critical responsibility. African men and women make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.  Another explanation is in order. Why do I talk about dictatorship rather than sovereignty or the authoritarian state? Let me begin by saying that I was at first reluctant to do so. I am very conscious that the enormities of African dictatorship exercise a kind of dubiously voyeuristic fascination for many Western observers. Sorry to say, there is a kind of pornography of dictatorship that has the unfortunate effect of distancing onlookers from their responsibility to address dictatorship in a serious and self-implicating way. The podgy despot in his Ruritanian general’s uniform or his bespoke pinstripes from the Place Vendôme is just one more cliché to set alongside other popular Western images of Africa’s supposedly incorrigible backwardness: machete-wielding mobs, spaced out youths toting Kalashnikovs or emaciated Oliver Twists holding out a bowl for the rich world’s pity and succour. Such images are everywhere and they serve an ideological purpose. While writing this study one of my then Ph.D. students gave me a glossy coffee-table-type book called Dictators’ Homes as a somewhat two-edged Christmas present. Dictators’ Homes pokes its nose into the private quarters of some of the last century’s worst despots. But the book’s author, the former editor of Harpers & Queen, takes by far the most pleasure in ridiculing the interior design tastes of the postcolonial world’s and especially

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Africa’s tyrants. In literally every case the voyeuristic snaps in Dictators’ Homes show how these bargain-counter Bonapartes’ predictably grandiose architectural and design conceptions are shown up by their residences’ tackiness and vulgarity. A besuited Saddam Hussein enters an anteroom in one of his many palaces from beneath a falcon in Italian marble that looks more like a giant balsawood pigeon; Jean-Bédel Bokassa appears as an ermine-clad buffoon straining to uphold an outsized crown next to a two-ton solid-gold eagle-shaped throne at his kitschy Napoleonthemed coronation; a gormless-looking Mobutu takes an important call next to a 24-carat lampshade. Yet what do we achieve by peeping behind the curtain to chortle at these grotesque wizards of Oz? Is there not a very grave danger that we relatively comfortable citizens of the over-developed world end up ghoulishly rubbernecking at the antics of these dictators from a safe aesthetic and moral distance? I want to construe dictatorship as a phenomenon whose origins can be found in the over-developed world itself, which must therefore take the lion’s share of the blame for the unremittingly imperialist system that first introduced authoritarian states to Africa and has maintained them in power in various forms ever since. The novels we shall examine summarily remove the distance that is established by the mass-media cliché of the African despot. Dictator novels remind us, firstly, of the prevalence and even ubiquity of the repressive state in postcolonial writing. A sense of the central and determining influence of the capitalist world-system in first imposing and then helping to maintain those authoritarian state structures is another of the potential consequences of reading these texts. They also, in addition, alert us to the nature and shape of the democratic alternatives to the persistent ‘statism’ of postcolonial societies. These novels’ principal merits, then, are their capacity to foreground the fact of political struggle while exploring, however obliquely or tentatively, the shape of the alternatives. In so doing, they press the claims of one of anti-colonialism’s noblest but least remembered goals: democracy. Nobody has put this point better than Leela Gandhi. Glossing David Lloyd’s idea of ‘nationalisms against the state’, Gandhi argues that anti-colonial nationalism was not just a state-centred project; it also contained anti-state aspirations that remain to be fulfilled. Thus, rather than being simply ‘derivative’ [of European nationalism], the insurgent moment of anti-colonial nationalism not only contradicts the

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pre-eminence of the State, but it also furnishes its dissent through the autonomous political imagination of the people-who-comprise-the-nation. So also is there a sense in which the recalcitrant elements, character, and actions invoked and energised by anti-colonial nationalism are ultimately in excess of the generic closure proposed by the postcolonial nation-State. And these indomitable features remain in circulation as vestigial traces of different imaginings struggling to find expression within the monotonous sameness which infects the postcolonial State.55

We are called upon to recognise that the radical democratisation of the nation states inherited from the colonial period is an indispensable aspect of what we ought to call, to adapt a phrase of Jürgen Habermas’s, the unfinished project of decolonisation.56 One of my principal claims in this study is that the history of Africa since independence has in fact been the history of an ongoing and as yet inconclusive struggle against the constraints placed on the continent’s peoples by the nation states established during the colonial period and kept in place thereafter. But I have been careful throughout to talk mainly about nation states. So accustomed are we to the critical practice of using literary texts to explore and espouse new forms of postcolonial identity, articulated variously under the rubric of cosmopolitanism, hybridity, globality, post-nationalism and so forth, that this vital second term is, unfortunately, often lost sight of. Worse, it is absent altogether from the concerns of many readings and discussions in the field, which focus instead on ‘nationness’, its sins and tribulations, while ‘stateness’, as it were, that Leviathan that has plagued Africa’s peoples under colonial rule and since, is ignored or even assumed in some way to be obsolete. In Lazarus’s words: Nearly all of the discussion has centred on the ‘Janus face’ of nationalism in general…; very little of it has addressed the specific agency of the postcolonial state, captured by the political class at independence, and actively deployed by it – for better and, mostly, for worse – thereafter.57

‘Despite its focus on nationalism’, as Pal Ahluwalia observes, ‘postcolonial theory has failed to engage fully with the state’.58 I suspect that one reason for this neglect is that many critics working within the field of postcolonial studies have been misled by the rhetoric of globalisation into thinking that economic globalisation has meant less state power rather than, as has actually been the case with every imperialist

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project in the past and present (no matter how cunningly their rapacity is concealed by euphemisms like ‘globalisation’), substantially more state power. It follows that exploring alternatives to imperialism or, if you prefer, exploring what a genuinely postcolonial dispensation might look like, also involves thinking about the alternatives to authoritarian state power. Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious argues that what I have characterised as its neglect of the state’s durability and objectionableness is part of postcolonial studies’ broader inattention to the persistence of a specifically modern social and political order in the ostensibly postcolonial world. That order is still characterised, he argues, by imperialism, uneven development and the unremitting centrality of the nation state. The experiences, concepts and themes attendant on capitalist modernity and its aesthetic representation are everywhere in postcolonial literature, Lazarus shows. Class relations, the capitalist mode of production, urbanisation, in addition to conflicts over the use and ownership of the land and over the possession and direction of the nation and the state are consequently the central preoccupations of virtually all writers whose work is composed in and about situations of imperialist domination.59 ‘The identification of the colonial state as a dictatorship, and the corollary celebration (or at least documentation) of the struggle against its repressive violence, lies at the heart of anticolonial writing’.60 This statement is axiomatic for me, as I think it should be for the discipline in general, provided that we accept, as Lazarus does, that what masquerades as the ‘postcolonial’ state is in fact nothing other than a prolongation of its more avowedly colonial predecessor and provided that we also acknowledge that much of what we usually call ‘postcolonial’ writing might instead, because of its manifest concern with and its hostility to phenomena like the coercive state, be characterised as anti-colonial writing. For ‘human collectivities’ on the receiving end of capital’s depredations, as Aijaz Ahmad argued thirty years ago in a comprehensive critique of the then emergent discipline of postcolonial studies, ‘all relationships with imperialism pass through their own nation-states, and there is simply no way of breaking out of that imperial dominance without struggling for different kinds of national projects and for a revolutionary restructuring of one’s own nation-state’.61 Thus, in Lazarus’s unimprovable formulation, ‘“postcolonial” writers have taken up the idea of the state as a particular (and privileged) instrument of political domination – hence as simultaneously at stake in and the site of struggles for power and justice, hegemony and freedom’.62 The novels

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discussed in this study present the state as a site of struggle in just this way. I am focussing on representations of the state in postcolonial Africa in a period of world history since the 1970s that we should think of as the age of neoliberalism. That is the other subject of Chapter 2. It is interesting to note that the discipline of postcolonial studies emerged during this period and became entrenched as a discipline or sub-discipline within the larger field of literary and cultural studies, particularly during the 1980s when the anti-collectivist and pro-market dogmas of neoliberalism became the unchallenged orthodoxy of the world’s governments, treasuries and central banks. That’s not to say, of course, that postcolonial studies is somehow a child of neoliberalism, with which it has always maintained a decidedly conflicted relationship. What is in my view by far the most consequential form of practice in which academics routinely engage, their activity as teachers, must have resulted in literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of students and citizens having their minds and perspectives broadened, their knowledge of the histories and cultures of the postcolonial world deepened, their analytical powers sharpened, their political investments made more critically self-conscious or even just their reading habits made more catholic. Those are political achievements of a high order. But as Lazarus has argued, the methods and priorities of the discipline have nonetheless been irrevocably shaped from the outset by the neoliberal conjuncture. The sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit belief that an identifiably modern order of imperialism and state and class power has been transcended by a new epoch that is in some ill-defined way now ‘post-modern’ and ‘postcolonial’ has resulted in the field’s frequent hostility to Marxism as well as its consequent neglect of the continuing exigencies of political and economic struggle, its sense that nations and states are things of the past, and its suspicion of the socialist or ‘liberationist’ goals of the previous generation of anti-colonial militants. As Lazarus carefully puts the case, the emergent field breathed the air of the reassertion of imperial dominance beginning in the 1970s, one of whose major preconditions was the containment and recuperation of the historic challenge from the ‘Third World’ that had been expressed in the struggle for decolonisation in the boom years after 1945. After 1975, the prevailing political sentiment in the West turned sharply against anticolonial nationalist insurgency and revolutionary

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anti-imperialism… The decisive defeat of liberationist ideologies within the western (or, increasingly, western-based) intelligentsia, including its radical elements – was fundamental to the emergent field, whose subsequent consolidation, during the 1980s and early 1990s, might then be seen, at least in part, as a function of its articulation of a complex intellectual response to this defeat.63

The important point, then, is not that postcolonialists enthusiastically favour neoliberalism but that they have, as it were, adjusted themselves to it in the specific sense that they have failed by and large to appreciate that this apparently new dispensation is not new at all and is in the process not of overcoming the familiar oppressions of state and class power but of extending and intensifying them. One of the things these novels do for us is demonstrate both the durability of imperialism, in the shape of neoliberalism’s attendant phenomena of social injustice, economic inequality and political authoritarianism, and the relevance of the projects and ideals that arose in the decades after the Second World War in order to combat imperialism. I cannot stress forcefully enough that what they do is, in a sense, place us all the way back in the era of anti-colonial liberation, the aspirations of which have regained (or rather been reassigned) an urgency that in fact they never lost. They awaken us from the delusions of neoliberalism that lulled the discipline in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This study is seeking to show, then, that neoliberalism certainly did not represent a substantial transformation of or a significant movement away from the forms assumed by imperialist power during the colonial period. To the contrary, the period since the 1970s has seen the prolongation and possibly even the intensification of imperialist power, in the shape principally of coercive and undemocratic state structures in the political sphere and of continuing relations of dependency and subordination in the economic sphere. It is much harder now for postcolonialists to believe that ‘globalisation’ is on course to transcend the oppressions and inequalities inherited from colonialism. The increased mobility of capital, which is usually what is meant by the superficially attractive euphemism of ‘globalisation’, was never a natural or serendipitous process of course, or one solely dictated by technological innovations such as satellite communications, containerised shipping or computerised accounting and credit systems. Capital did not simply begin to travel of its own accord; it was impelled by force

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against and then through the barriers that both reformist and revolutionary regimes had erected in an attempt to control its predacious movements. In the 1970s and 1980s third-world economies were, to use Walden Bello’s metaphor, ‘blasted open’ by the heavy ordinance of the World Bank and the IMF operating on behalf of first-world capital.64 ‘Globalisation’ was a project driven by the chicanery and violence of Western states and of the international financial institutions those states control. It has definitely not alleviated the perennial unevenness of capitalist development, as its spokespeople claimed it would and are still waiting in vain for it to do. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the performance of dictatorial power. They place Wizard of the Crow and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote in what has often been seen as a predominantly Latin American tradition of dictator novels. Many African dictator novels resemble their Latin American predecessors, to which they are noticeably indebted, above all in their preoccupation with aesthetic questions of language, performance and reception. The task that these novels set themselves is to perform the dictator’s power in language and thereby advertise its limitations. They accentuate dictatorial power’s vulnerability not only to the alternatives and rejoinders represented in both novels by mass movements of political resistance but also to the intercessions of readers who are thereby recruited as representatives or practitioners of deliberation and critique, two key attributes required to supplant dictatorial power. Both novels trace the links between the colonial state and its postcolonial successor and between Western powers and financial agencies and the African dictator. Importantly, they also stress the durability of dictatorial power in an era of ostensible ‘democratisation’ while urging the necessity of a radically democratic counter-movement. ‘Allegories of dictatorship in Nigerian fiction’, the final chapter, reads Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003). These two novels about the Babangida and Abacha dictatorships of the 1980s and 90s provide evidence to corroborate Fredric Jameson’s ‘national allegory’ thesis. I read these novels as allegorical reflections on power struggles at the level of the nation state between authoritarianism and democratisation. Both novels stress the essential relationship between national liberation and the liberation of women. They construe liberation not as an abstract political programme but as the combined result of individual initiatives and resolutions, in the process illustrating the genius of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. The aim is

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to rescue Anthills from its mischaracterisation as an anti-feminist novel by construing it instead as a goad to readers’ reflections on the vexed questions of how to combine feminist with socialist politics and individual initiative with collective political struggle. Similarly, I want to show how Purple Hibiscus portrays a gradual and by the end of the novel still incomplete acquisition by its narrator-protagonist of the distinguishing political aptitudes of critique, defiance and eloquent speech. It bequeaths these tasks to its readers. This chapter and indeed the entire study hope to illustrate through close reading the shared and enduring but at the same time extremely formally and thematically diverse preoccupation of African fiction with struggles against authoritarianism and for radical democratisation. I conclude the book by arguing that these novels provide signposts to the more democratic and egalitarian dispensation that must take neoliberalism’s place.

Notes 1. Ahmadou Kourouma, Allah Is Not Obliged, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Vintage, 2007 [2000], p. 61. 2. John S. Saul, Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001, p. 25. 3. A Brief History of Neoliberalism touches in several places on structural adjustment and the making over of the Bretton Woods institutions into devices for inflicting debt and economic shock therapy but its focus is on neoliberal practice and ideology in the US, Europe and China. Wendy Brown’s focus in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, MIT Press, 2015 and that of William Davies in The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition, Revised edition, London: Sage, 2017, are on the ideology of competition and on ‘neoliberal rationality’ and its political consequences in Western democracies. Exceptions here are Lee Wengraf’s Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018; Ankie Hoogvelt’s Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997, pp. 162– 181; and William K. Tabb, The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. See also Patrick Bond, ‘Neoliberalism in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Structural Adjustment to NEPAD’, Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader, ed. Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston, London: Pluto, 2005, pp. 230–236.

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4. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 19, emphasis in the original. 5. Naomi Klein’s is the definitive account of the way in which ruthless state power was required to install the rule of ‘the market’ and redistribute wealth and assets upwards. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Allen Lane, 2008. 6. Ralph Miliband, Class War Conservatism and Other Essays, London: Verso, 2015 [1983]. 7. Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements, London: Verso, 1989, p. 54. 8. Ahmadou Kourouma, The Suns of Independence, trans. Adrian Adams, New York: Africana Publishing, 1968, p. 129. 9. Dictatorship is less frequently a theme of African playwrights; exceptions include Wole Soyinka’s A Play of Giants, Opera Wonyosi and Kongi’s Harvest. African prison memoirs and diaries also display an impressive fixation with political repression and a commensurate insistence on the relationship between writing and freedom. Examples include Breyten Breytenbach’s Mouroir (1984), Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Detained (1981), Abdellatif Laâbi’s Chroniques de la citadelle d’exil (1983), Nawal el Saadawi’s Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (1983), Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died (1975) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s A Month and a Day (1995). 10. Daniel Kalder, Dictator Literature: A History of Despots Through Their Writing, London: Oneworld, 2018. 11. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman, London: Routledge, 1993 [1948], p. 46. 12. Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method, London: Granta, 1997 [1975], p. 84. 13. W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’, The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927 -1939, ed. Edward Mendelson, London: Faber & Faber, 1977, p. 245. 14. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, ‘Introduction’, Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature, ed. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2014, pp. xi–xxxi (p. xxx). The ‘extreme’ can be found in ‘Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o and the African Dictator Novel’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 47:2 (2012), 145–158. 15. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 232. 16. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, trans. A.M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last and Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, p. 108. 17. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 102.

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18. Brady Smith, ‘Wizards, Superwonders, and a Fictional African State: Money and the Ecology of the Grotesque in Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow’, Research in African Literatures, 46:3 (2015), 165–189 (p. 168). 19. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, p. 103. 20. Jeremy Weate, ‘Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going Beyond the Text’, Research in African Literatures, 34:4 (2003), 27–41 (p. 33). 21. Ibid., p. 36, emphasis in the original. 22. Ibid., p. 35. 23. Charlotte Baker, ‘Performances of Sovereignty in African DictatorFiction’, Research in African Literatures, 49.3 (2018), vii–xiv (p. vii). 24. Achille Mbembe, ‘On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics’, Qui Parle, 15.2 (2005), 1–49 (p. 8). 25. Cécile Bishop, Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny, London: Legenda, 2015, pp. 4–5. 26. Michael K. Walonen, Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016, p. 15. 27. Raphael Dalleo, ‘Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and Postcolonial Pedagogy’, Research in African Literatures, 43:2 (2012), 138–154. 28. Dalleo, ‘Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and Postcolonial Pedagogy’, p. 139. 29. Oliver Lovesey, ‘Representation of Idi Amin in Ugandan Dictatorship Novels’, Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, Unmasking the African Dictator, pp. 85–109 (p. 91). 30. Ibid., p. 92. 31. Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland, London: Faber & Faber, 2006 [1998], p. 40. 32. The key texts here are undoubtedly Ernst Bloch’s massive three-volume study of utopian auguries in everything from classical philosophy to fairy tales in addition to the ebullient conclusion to Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, London: Routledge, 1996 [1981], pp. 281–299 and Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols, trans. Neville Plaice, Steven Plaice and Paul Knight, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986. 33. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780-1950, New York: Anchor Books, 1960, p. 305. 34. Ibid., p. 313. 35. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1949], p. 68. Subsequent quotations are given in the text after 1984. 36. Julius Caesar, I.ii.139. 37. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times, London: Verso, 2010, p. 328. Subsequent references are given in the main text after LTC.

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38. Chinua Achebe, ‘Colonialist Criticism’, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987 , London: Heinemann, 1988, pp. 46–61 (p. 49). 39. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World, London: Verso, 2007, p. xviii. 40. Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly, Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change, London: Zed Books, 2015, p. 1. 41. James Ferguson, Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 4. 42. James Ferguson, ‘Reply to the Comments on Global Shadows ’, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, 29 (2008), 270–273 (p. 271). 43. Graham Harrison, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering, London: Zed Books, 2010, p. 16. 44. John S. Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in Southern Africa, Merlin Press, 2005, p. 18. 45. Jameson’s maxim, about the need to postulate historical narratives, is: “We cannot not periodize.” Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, London: Verso, 2002, p. 29. 46. G.W.F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. T.M. Knox, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 27. 47. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991, p. 5. 48. Quoted in Harry Browne, The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power), London: Verso, 2013, p. 97. 49. Ibid., p. 4. 50. Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, p. 5. 51. Neil Lazarus, ‘The Global Dispensation Since 1945’, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 19–40 (p. 34). 52. Paul Kenyon, Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, London: Head of Zeus, 2018. 53. Joe Trapido, ‘Africa’s Leaky Giant’, New Left Review, 92 (2015), 5–40 (p. 7). Subsequent references are given in the main text after ‘ALG’. 54. Tunde Zack-Williams and Graham Harrison, ‘Africa’s Future Is Up to Africans. Really?’ Review of African Political Economy, 121 (2009), 311– 316 (p. 312). 55. Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, New York: Columbia University Press, 1998, p. 120. 56. Habermas’s original phrase refers, of course, to the unfinished or incomplete project (ein unvollendetes projekt ) of modernity. Jürgen Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished Project’, Contemporary Sociological Theory, ed. Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff and Idermohan Virk, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 444–450.

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57. Neil Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 70, emphasis in the original. The reference to nationalism’s ‘Janus face’ is an allusion to Tom Nairn’s claim that nationalism always faces in two directions at the same time, forwards towards popular sovereignty and backwards towards exclusionary ideas about identity. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism, Second expanded edition, London: New Left Books, 1977, pp. 347–348. 58. Pal Ahluwalia, Politics and Post-colonial Theory: African Inflections, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 52. 59. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 35. 60. Ibid., p. 64, emphasis in the original. 61. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, p. 11. 62. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 76, emphasis in the original. 63. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 9. 64. Walden Bello, Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau, Dark Victory: The US, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty, London: Pluto Press, 1994, p. 5.

References Achebe, Chinua. 1988. “Colonialist Criticism.” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987 . London: Heinemann, pp. 46–61. Ahmad, Aijaz. 1992. In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. London: Verso. Ahluwalia, Pal. 2001. Politics and Post-colonial Theory: African Inflections. London: Routledge. Arrighi, Giovanni. [1994] 2010. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso. Arrighi, Giovanni, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1989. Antisystemic Movements. London: Verso. Auden, W.H. 1977. The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. Edward Mendelson. London: Faber & Faber. Baker, Charlotte. 2018. “Performances of Sovereignty in African DictatorFiction.” Research in African Literatures 49.3, vii–xiv. Bello, Walden, Shea Cunningham and Bill Rau. 1994. Dark Victory: The US, Structural Adjustment, and Global Poverty. London: Pluto Press. Bishop, Cécile. 2015. Postcolonial Criticism and Representations of African Dictatorship: The Aesthetics of Tyranny. London: Legenda. Bloch, Ernst. 1986. The Principle of Hope. 3 vols. Trans. Neville Plaice, Steven Plaice and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Bond, Patrick. 2005. “Neoliberalism in Sub-Saharan Africa: From Structural Adjustment to NEPAD.” Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. Ed. Alfredo Saad-Filho and Deborah Johnston. London: Pluto, pp. 230–236. Branch, Adam and Zachariah Mampilly. 2015. Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. London: Zed Books. Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Browne, Harry. 2013. The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power). London: Verso. Collier, Paul. 2008. The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. Oxford: Oxford UP. Dalleo, Raphael. 2012. “Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and Postcolonial Pedagogy.” Research in African Literatures 43.2, 138–154. Davies, William. The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition. Revised edition. London: Sage, 2017. Ferguson, James. 2006. Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke UP. ———. 2008. “Reply to the Comments on Global Shadows.” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 29, 270–273. Foden, Giles. [1998] 2006. The Last King of Scotland. London: Faber & Faber. Gandhi, Leela. 1998. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. New York: Columbia UP. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı. 2014. “Introduction.” Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature. Ed. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı. Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P, pp. xi–xxxi. Habermas, Jürgen. 2012. “Modernity: An Unfinished Project.” Contemporary Sociological Theory. Ed. Craig Calhoun, Joseph Gerteis, James Moody, Steven Pfaff and Idermohan Virk. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 444–450. Harrison, Graham. 2010. Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering. London: Zed Books. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hegel, G.W.F. 2008. Outlines of the Philosophy of Right. Trans. T.M. Knox. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hoogvelt, Ankie. 1997. Globalisation and the Postcolonial World: The New Political Economy of Development. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Jameson. Fredric. [1981] 1996. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge. ———. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. ———. 2002. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. London: Verso.

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Kalder, Daniel. 2018. Dictator Literature: A History of Despots Through Their Writing. London: Oneworld. Kenyon, Paul. 2018. Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa. London: Head of Zeus. Klein, Naomi. 2008. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Allen Lane. Kourouma, Ahmadou. 1968. The Suns of Independence. Trans. Adrian Adams. New York: Africana Publishing. ———. [2000] 2007. Allah Is Not Obliged. Trans. Frank Wynne. London: Vintage. Lazarus, Neil. 2004. “The Global Dispensation Since 1945.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 19–40. ———. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Lovesey, Oliver. 2014. “Representation of Idi Amin in Ugandan Dictatorship Novels.” Ed. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı. Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature. Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P, pp. 85–109. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Trans. A.M. Berrett, Janet Roitman, Murray Last and Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P. ———. 2005. “On the Postcolony: A Brief Response to Critics.” Qui Parle 15.2, 1–49. Miliband, Ralph. [1983] 2015. Class War Conservatism and Other Essays. London: Verso. Nairn, Tom. 1977. The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism. Second edition. London: New Left Books. Orwell, George. [1949] 2001. Nineteen Eighty-Four. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Prashad, Vijay. 2007. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. London: Verso. Said, Edward W. [1975] 1997. Beginnings: Intention and Method. London: Granta. Sartre, Jean-Paul. [1948] 1993. What Is Literature? Trans. Bernard Frechtman. London: Routledge. Saul, John S. 2001. Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ———. 2005. The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy in Southern Africa. London: Merlin Press. Smith, Brady. 2015. “Wizards, Superwonders, and a Fictional African State: Money and the Ecology of the Grotesque in Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow.” Research in African Literatures 46.3, 165–189. Spencer, Robert. 2012. “Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o and the African Dictator Novel.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 47.2, 145–158.

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Tabb, William K. 2001. The Amoral Elephant: Globalization and the Struggle for Social Justice in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Monthly Review Press. Trapido, Joe. 2015. “Africa’s Leaky Giant.” New Left Review 92, 5–40. Walonen, Michael K. 2016. Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Weate, Jeremy. 2003. “Achille Mbembe and the Postcolony: Going Beyond the Text.” Research in African Literatures 34.4, 27–41. Wengraf, Lee. 2018. Extracting Profit: Imperialism, Neoliberalism, and the New Scramble for Africa. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Williams, Raymond. 1960. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Anchor Books. Zack-Williams, Tunde and Graham Harrison. 2009. “Africa’s Future Is Up to Africans. Really?” Review of African Political Economy 121, 311–316.

CHAPTER 2

Neoliberalism and the ‘Recolonisation’ of Africa

In a sober assessment of the fortunes of the independence generation at the end of the 1970s John Saul observed that ‘the handing over of the state – the ceding of formal political power – to Africans has seemed a mere bagatelle, the giving up of a dispensable pawn in the ongoing imperial game’.1 The transfer of state power had not substantively altered the hierarchical and frequently authoritarian character of political regimes. Nor had it enabled those states to surmount their subordinate role in the world economy. What Saul elsewhere calls ‘a meaningful advance towards human development’ would clearly not be possible within the context of a capitalist world economy more or less unreformed since the colonial era.2 The unending scramble for the continent’s resources had made of Africa a lastingly peripheral region of the world-system, peripheral in the specific sense that despite the gains of independence most of Africa and most Africans have been forced to act as a hub for the quick and ‘efficient’ export of primary products, ‘the evacuation of commodities to the global economy’ as Joe Trapido puts it.3 The world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein has provided a useful chronicle of the forcible integration of Africa into the capitalist world economy, a process that this chapter claims has not yet been reversed. The first phase saw the ‘peripheralisation’ of Africa by slavery and the slave trade and by European trading arrangements with coastal territories that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2_2

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largely retained their own sovereignty. Only with the onset of the long world depression of 1873–1896 did this first phase give way to an accelerating ‘scramble for Africa’ by European powers. The more extensive as well as intensive second phase of ‘peripheralisation’ that took place at the end of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries saw the whole of Africa (with the exception of Liberia and Ethiopia) brought under direct European control in order to ensure the supply of raw materials and export crops. Writing in 1976, Wallerstein suggests that the third stage of Africa’s integration into the world economy ‘will take one of two forms: dependent development or revolutionary transformation as part of a network of forces within the world-economy as a whole’.4 That the former course was in fact taken is not so much a testament to Wallerstein’s powers of prophecy as a powerful indication that even though Africa’s political and economic relationship with the rest of the world has always been negotiable the possibility of effecting a ‘revolutionary transformation’ of that relationship has always been (and remains) an extraordinarily difficult and as yet uncompleted task. The institutions of predominantly agrarian societies were overwhelmed by colonial rule. Existing systems of power were stamped out, populations were forcibly transported, rural life was rapidly commercialised, peasants were turned into paupers and everywhere religious and cultural life was systematically put out of joint.5 Coercive institutions were then bequeathed after independence to new ruling elites that remained in power with the diplomatic and often military backing of powerful Western allies: in Eqbal Ahmad’s words, ‘the contemporary Third World state was a colonial creation, controlled by and conditioned to serve the imperial metropolis’.6 Why? So that resources could be extracted as ‘efficiently’ as possible. Something similar happens to this day. Pliant regimes, whether those regimes consist of despots or neoliberal technocrats, keep the people quiet so that they and their foreign clients can continue extracting those resources and enriching themselves at the people’s expense. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the continuity of authoritarian state power in sub-Saharan Africa since independence. Africa’s indispensable role in the world market as a producer of primary commodities has necessitated the stymieing of the original aspirations of anti-colonial liberation, among which were the wholesale renegotiation of Africa’s peripheral role in the world-system and, within states, the replacement of undemocratic structures and parasitic elites with new forms of democratic control. The

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story of postcolonial Africa is the story of the continent’s unfinished revolution. Debt has been employed since the International Monetary Fund and World Bank-dictated ‘restructurings’ of the 1980s to bleed Africa’s economies dry and confine them all the more decisively to the role of impoverished providers of primary commodities. Mike Davis goes so far as to compare this criminal act, both in its significance to the continuing profitability of the world economy and in its catastrophic human and ecological consequences, to the process whereby subsistence peasantries in Africa and Asia were ‘dynamically conscripted into a London-centred world economy’ at the end of the nineteenth century.7 Since the 1970s debt has been ‘the forcing-house’, Davis argues, ‘of an epochal transfer of power from Third World nations to the Bretton Woods institutions controlled by the United States and other core capitalist countries’.8 This gigantic relocation of power and wealth was no less significant and catastrophic than the initial commodification of third-world agriculture in the late Victorian period. The droughts and famines that struck Africa and Asia at that time, exacerbated by the murderous negligence of the colonial authorities, uprooted ‘tens of millions of peasants’ who were then ‘warehoused by the late Victorian world-economy in the purgatory of marginal petty-commodity production’ (LVH , 208). This forcible incorporation of vast numbers of men, women and children into the world economy, Davis argues, actively brought the dependent and ‘semi-proletarianized’ ‘third world’ into being. ‘Millions died, not outside the “modern world system,” but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures’ (LVH , 9). The vast gulf in income and wealth that was shaped decisively in the final decades of the nineteenth century during the initial phase of Africa’s conquest by imperialism was extended into the present by structural adjustment. Axiomatic for this study, therefore, is the belief that Africa’s economic and political underdevelopment result from the peculiarities of the continent’s insertion into the capitalist world-system under colonialism, a fate from which, alas, it has not yet escaped.9 I intend in this chapter to provide a much more detailed account of the way in which the reassertion of imperial power in the context of a profound crisis of profitability in global capitalism since the 1970s10 has led, among other things, to what Saul calls the concerted ‘recolonization’ of Africa in this period.11 What this chapter provides is a brief history of neoliberalism in Africa. This is the continent that suffered first and most grievously from what Arrighi calls

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the ‘US-led capitalist counter-offensive of the late 1970s and early 1980s’ against the revolutionary ideals of national liberation in the third world (LTC, 328). After the 1970s global ‘elites’ contrived not only to ensure that Africa’s wealth continued to pour northwards but actively to increase the rate of flow. This period has witnessed a colossal transfer of value from the global South to the global North via debt, unequal exchange and ‘imperial rents’, as Samir Amin has argued.12 For the peoples of the South, as Walden Bello et al. claim, the ‘defining features’ of the period since the 1970s have been ‘the rollback of their living standards, the virtual loss of their economic sovereignty, and the increased hollowness of their political independence’.13 The novels analysed in this study attest therefore to the miscarried or even abortive quality of Africa’s anti-colonial revolutions, one of the deepest aspirations of which, I am claiming, was to construct democratic and egalitarian alternatives to the coercive nature of the colonial state and its successors as well as to the exploitative economic system those states exist to superintend. Since the 1970s the efforts of radical movements in Africa to break away from the subordinate role long ago assigned to that continent in and by the world economy have been repeatedly foiled. Why? Because it was deemed necessary to nip the revolutionary promise of decolonisation in the bud, ‘to keep the Third World in line’, in Susan George’s pithy formulation.14

The Origins of Dictatorship ‘Strange though it may seem’, as the Frankfurt School fellow traveller Franz Neumann once bemoaned, ‘we do not possess any systematic study of dictatorship’.15 Alas, this remains as true today as it was in the 1950s. The present study of postcolonial African dictatorships and of the way in which those regimes have been represented by novelists during the era of neoliberalism must as a consequence excavate its own theoretical foundations. A suitable place at which to thrust a spade into the earth might be to ask the following question: What is a dictator? Gopal Balakrishnan reminds us that the term referred originally to ‘an extraordinary magistrate in the Roman Republic commissioned for the duration of a political emergency, usually war or sedition, to restore order by suspending normal legal procedure’.16 This is what the German jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt, one of dictatorship’s most rigorous theorists, called a ‘commissarial dictatorship’.17 But Neumann questions whether these Roman dictatorships were dictatorships at all, at least in the modern sense

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of the term, being more like forms of ‘Crisis Government’ or magistracies which were clearly defined in scope and duration. We, like Neumann, are more concerned with political systems ‘in which power is arrogated by an individual or a group’ not those in which power is simply leant to that individual or group for a fixed period of time before being taken back.18 In a ‘sovereign dictatorship’, to use Schmitt’s terms again, which is by far the most common type of dictatorship and the one this study is interested in, popular sovereignty is not just suspended but actively negated; power is taken not conferred, retained rather than returned. These dictators are not, to use the Roman terminology, dictators rei gerundae causa (for the matter to be done) but, like Julius Caesar, dictators perpetuo. In his Political Theology Schmitt provides a useful definition of dictatorship (though of course he differs from me in actually advocating that form of rule!) when he describes a sovereignty that stands outside any political constraints. Dictatorship refers in the present study, therefore, to authoritarian regimes that flout or seek to negate popular sovereignty. Widely used synonyms for such regimes include tyranny, oligarchy and despotism. But these are words that differ slightly from dictatorship because as Neumann notes they are employed largely for purposes of denunciation rather than rigorous description.19 Dictatorship is therefore this study’s preferred term for a form of political rule that is characterised, to varying degrees, by violence, control, clientelism, inequality, militarism and by an absence or dearth of democratic institutions. Dictatorship means the negation of popular sovereignty. Dictatorships are bulwarks against democracy. Indeed, as we shall see, they usually arise as ways of foiling radical democratic movements. The frustration of democratic advances, in other words, is dictatorship’s raison d’être. Dictatorship is still, alas, a very common form of rule. This assertion might appear slightly less platitudinous if one observes that it is true not only of approved enemies like the recently deposed gerontocrat in Zimbabwe or of Pyongyang’s boyish Moloch but of purportedly liberal states too. Such states have their own ways of preventing electorates from interfering in the business of the state, which of course usually turns out to be, precisely, business, i.e. the returns of the rich. In my view the capitalist world-system itself, about which I shall soon have a lot more to say, should be characterised as dictatorial. The Brazilian political theorist Roberto Unger refers to it as ‘the dictatorship of no alternatives’,20 a situation in which, due to the ascendancy of neoliberalism across the globe since the 1980s, the desire to safeguard and maximise

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corporate profits has entrenched vast inequalities at the same time as it has eviscerated, at both national and supra-national levels, the democratic structures with which the world’s peoples have sought to reverse this process or at least to hold it back. A central tenet of these reflections will be that Western states not only dictate to their own populations but to those of other, nominally independent, states as well. The dictatorial character of the world-system is the main reason why dictatorships continue to flourish at the local level; this is one of the insights that dictator novels serve to get across. Dictatorship in Africa is one of colonialism’s enduring legacies; the institutions handed over at independence were at best undemocratic and at worst carefully perfected mechanisms for preventing the people from interfering in the business of plunder and exploitation. Dictatorship has also been one of the chief ways in which Western states and corporations have extended their colonial and this time neo-colonial sway over Africa since the achievement of nominal political sovereignty in the three decades after the Second World War. When we ask why African states since independence have been invariably unequal, sometimes authoritarian and frequently dictatorial, we need to ponder the main reason for the weakness of democratic traditions and institutions on the continent. There are three of these: the legacy of European colonial rule, which ought to be seen as an especially egregious form of dictatorship; the enduring interest of capitalist powers in discouraging and where necessary actively forestalling democratisation; and the interest of African elites in preventing this process. They are really three aspects of the same problem: the tenacity and persistence of imperialism in Africa. Democracy has been stymied so that Africa’s peoples might be prevented from developing alternatives to the continent’s dependent role in the world economy. The state in colonial Africa, imposed by violence and by alien powers, was typically a carefully perfected mechanism for dominating the populace and for enriching a ruling class at their expense; the state in Africa, which tends to rest not on consent but on patronage and coercion, was ‘born lacking legitimacy’, as Pierre Englebert has written.21 As Neil Lazarus has argued, we would ‘do best to think of [the colonial state] as a kind of dictatorship’.22 It was coercive, high-handed and unconstitutional. It had its origins in conquest and it resembled an army of occupation rather than the expression of a popular or general will. By destroying precolonial institutions and precluding popular constraints on state power,

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colonialism helped produce the conditions in which dictatorship could continue to flourish in postcolonial Africa. Wallerstein has identified a historical connection between strong states in the global North and weak states in the global South: ‘The concentration of capital in core zones created both the fiscal base and the political motivation to create relatively strong state machineries, among whose many capacities was that of ensuring that the state machineries of peripheral zones became or remained relatively weaker’.23 Wallerstein expands on this point in the first volume of The Modern World-System, his four-volume study of the emergence and consolidation of the global though uneven scope of modern capitalism. A strong state, one that commands broad consent or at least acquiescence (as opposed to hostility or mere fear), is usually one that does not rely solely on force since it has to some extent found ways of acknowledging the interests and wants of different social groups. It is strong also in its ability to hold its own among other states and strong too in its ability to compel weaker states to do its bidding. [T]he world economy develops a pattern where state structures are relatively strong in the core areas and relatively weak in the periphery… What do we mean by a strong state-machinery? We mean strength vis-à-vis other states within the world-economy including other core-states, and strong vis-à-vis local political units within the boundaries of the state. In effect, we mean a sovereignty that is de facto as well as de jure. We also mean a state that is strong vis-à-vis any particular social group within the state. Obviously, such groups vary in the amount of pressure they can bring to bear upon the state. It is not that the state is a neutral arbiter. But the state is more than a simple vector of given forces… A strong state then is a partially autonomous entity in the sense that it has a margin of action available to it wherein it reflects the compromise of mutual interests.24

Strong states are strong in their ability to facilitate development and command consent while the weakness of weak states consists of their inability to command consent and thus their consequent reliance on force. ‘The peripheral state is then necessarily despotic because it is weak’, as Samir Amin too has argued.25 Since ‘independence’ Africa has remained prey to the interference of external powers intent on perpetuating its peripheral status and therefore on nurturing weak but authoritarian regimes. Near the top of this long list of intercessions would be the invasion of Egypt by Britain, Israel and France in 1956; the murder of Patrice Lumumba at the hands of the

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CIA and Belgian special forces; as well as France’s continuing sway over la Françafrique and its political and often military interference in Chad, Gabon, Niger, Rwanda, the Central African Republic and most recently Mali.26 On the subject of Lumumba, it’s worth pointing out that Ludo de Witte’s investigation has proved once and for all that his murder was the work of Belgian special forces, abetted by the United Nations and the United States. The Belgian government was determined to maintain its control over the Congo after independence. De Witte argues that the crisis in the Congo in the first years after independence should not be analysed, as it usually is, in relation to the Cold War. Kremlin bureaucrats were interested less in African revolution than in stability and peaceful coexistence with Washington.27 We should see the crisis in terms of the capitalist West’s desire to contain anti-colonial revolution and prolong Africa’s dependency. Nobody has put that point as pithily as Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman: The old colonial world was shattered during World War II, and the resultant nationalist-radical upsurge threatened traditional western hegemony and the economic interests of Western business. To contain this threat the United States has aligned itself with elite and military elements in the Third World whose function has been to contain the tides of change.28

In the fifteen years after the war one European power after another abandoned its attempts to retain its colonies as first Holland and Britain and then Belgium and France and eventually also Spain and Portugal lined up behind the United States and committed themselves to its project of exerting more indirect (though often no less coercive) forms of imperial power in cahoots with conservative ruling elements in the postcolonial world. Panitch and Gindin call this arrangement the ‘internationalization of the state’, a process whereby individual states accept local responsibility for maintaining the international capitalist order under the leadership of the American state.29 One of the main aims of that system was to foil the efforts of those nation states that sought, in Chomsky’s words, to ‘separate themselves from the U.S.-dominated world system and attempt to use their resources for their own development’.30 I am pointing here to the fact that Western powers greeted independence for Africa, which they could do nothing to prevent, as an opportunity to prolong and also to

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conceal their sway over their former colonies. Like Tancredi in Lampedusa’s The Leopard, political and corporate elites in the Global North resigned themselves to the fact that everything must change in order that things could stay exactly the same. Of course a large part of the blame for Africa’s reverses must be shouldered by the continent’s rulers for their cupidity, their unimaginative plans for development and their inability and often unwillingness to establish democratic links with the dispossessed. Economic underdevelopment (by which I mean most of Africa’s impecuniousness, its dearth of decent housing, health care and so on) and political underdevelopment (the prevalence of undemocratic state structures) were problems that reinforced each other in the years after independence. ‘Elites’, shielded from democratic accountability, presided over dependent and underdeveloped economies the principal purpose or function of which, looked at globally, was to produce cut-price resources for corporate monopolies that did not reinvest their profits in Africa but largely repatriated them overseas. Thus Panitch and Gindin describe how the period since decolonisation has witnessed the relentless entrenchment of a system of sovereign states, with the US at the top and other first-world powers and also ‘elites’ in Europe’s former colonies each assuming responsibility for maintaining the international system that enriches them all. My point is that this is a system that Africans inherited from their colonial oppressors, one that has been exceedingly difficult to break out of. Africa’s economies were severely skewed and hampered at independence, geared principally to resource extraction for export and accumulation overseas. In the mid-1960s the assets of three US corporations (General Motors, Du Pont and the Bank of America) exceeded the gross domestic product of the whole of Africa.31 Contrary to what it said so loudly and conceitedly about itself, the very purpose of the colonial system had been to stand in the way, by any and all methods, of every kind of autonomous development, whether it be political, educational, cultural and above all economic. There was growth aplenty in Africa under colonial rule of course, though precious little development in any meaningful sense. Growth’s proceeds were almost always repatriated to Europe. Hardly any of it trickled down to Africans themselves. The great historian of Africa Basil Davidson tells us that on the day of independence in 1964 booming Zambia found itself with exactly one secondary school: ‘So far as the bulk of the population was concerned, a soaring gross domestic product had about as much value as an avalanche of bowler hats’.32 Few

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areas of modern development existed in independent Africa and those that did were structured for export. Many of Africa’s economies relied for foreign exchange earnings and government revenues on the export of a single commodity such as copper or cocoa, making even the most prosperous countries vulnerable to subsequent fluctuations in (or sometimes the fixing of) global commodity prices and to competition from synthetic substitutes in other regions of the world. At independence most nations were organised geographically for the purpose of export, with the hinterlands often subordinated to an outsized and over-privileged capital city. Much of the interior remained isolated and the continent’s various regions were largely disconnected from each other. Africa had a miniscule manufacturing base and its people largely lacked (or rather had been denied) the skills and expertise required to develop the continent’s infrastructure: in the mordant words of Walter Rodney, ‘the vast majority of Africans went into colonialism with a hoe and came out with a hoe’.33 Furthermore, economies were mostly owned or controlled by foreign corporations and were almost wholly dependent on foreign markets and capital. Even today in what Leo Zeilig and David Seddon refer to as ‘successful failed states’ like Angola and Nigeria there is growth without development.34 Almost wholly dependent on the ‘enclave industry’ of oil extraction, these states provide wealth for a tiny elite and for multinational corporations but only slums and collapsed infrastructure for the majority.35 This is jobless growth, unprecedented booms in GDP accompanied by catastrophic increases in inequality. GDP growth is the main focus of celebratory ‘Africa rising’ narratives in the business press. But as Ian Taylor has shown, galloping growth as a result of Africa’s enduring dependency on the export of basic commodities such as oil, minerals and agricultural products (80% of Africa’s export revenues in 2012), growth which is by definition unstable, has not produced employment, tax revenues, investment in health and education or any challenge to the entrenched class formations that hoard revenues or else allow them to be spirited abroad: ‘The current model of growth so far has been ineffective in engendering sustainable developmental outcomes and has made things worse vis-à-vis equality, the environment and Africa’s dependent status within the global political economy’.36 To this day the money made in Africa does not stay in Africa. Today in Nigeria, a country of 170 million people with vast natural resources, 68% of the population lives in extreme poverty on less than $1.25 a day.37 In Angola there are seven politicians or former politicians worth over $100 million each, members all of the

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People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola.38 The wealth of the President’s daughter alone is said by Forbes magazine to run into the billions. Other people’s daughters and sons don’t fare quite so well of course, since half of all children in this splendidly endowed petro state are malnourished. And every year at least $1 billion simply ‘evaporates’ from Angolan government accounts. Oil and gas production in Angola and Nigeria are dominated by multinationals such as Shell and Total; profits, instead of being reinvested in education, housing or health care, are either pilfered or repatriated (which amounts to the same thing) by local elites and foreign firms. Most damaging of all to Africa’s prospects of reversing its economic and political underdevelopment has been the imposition since the 1970s of so-called structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) by the global financial institutions and the Western states that control them. These were the principal devices that prolonged and indeed exacerbated economic dependency in much of postcolonial Africa and are therefore the central focus of this study of fictional representations of the authoritarian state. Sub-Saharan Africa’s largely dependent and foreign-owned economies generated little in the way of surpluses in the first years after independence. So new governments borrowed from Northern banks the investment capital they needed to stimulate development and to finance infrastructure programmes. They were soon crippled by the burden of debt. Because African economies could not (or rather, were not permitted to) compete with those in the first world, the interest payments on these loans quickly outweighed the benefits of the extra investment. As a result, the cost of debt-servicing soon became unmanageable. The SAPs imposed in return for essential further loans have meant the suspension of the moderately successful interventionist model of ‘import substitution’ development employed by African states in the years following independence. In the late 1970s the IMF changed its role from a provider of credit to countries with a short-term current account deficit to what Vijay Prashad has called ‘a weapon to demand structural economic changes’ in the postcolonial world.39 The debt crisis became ‘the Trojan horse for an assault’ against the project ‘for the construction of Third World sovereignty’.40 More than seventy third-world states submitted to SAPs in the 1980s, including most of sub-Saharan Africa, making the ‘shock therapy’ administered by the World Bank and IMF ‘the common condition of the South in that decade’41 according to Bello et al., ‘a permanent part of life in

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most of the developing world’42 according to the former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz. Either reluctant governments (like those of Mozambique and Tanzania) were obliged out of desperation to go cap in hand to the World Bank and the IMF or thoroughly corrupt governments (like that of Zaire) gladly threw their countries at those institutions’ feet. Thirty-six sub-Saharan African states contracted for 241 SAPs with the World Bank and IMF.43 Essential loans were made conditional on drastic cuts in government spending on health, education, infrastructure and social provision (ostensibly to control inflation), the removal of food subsidies and tariff barriers, currency devaluations (supposedly to make exports more competitive), the deregulation of markets (including agricultural markets), the privatisation of state and parastatal industries and the removal of restrictions on foreign investment.44 These so-called reforms led invariably to lower and even negative rates of growth, to slumps in investment as well as much greater poverty and inequality, not to mention severe housing crises and environmental degradation. SAPs devastated the living standards of the poor by reducing incomes and employment and by introducing user fees for public services, though as Mike Davis observes they ‘made no counter-effort to reduce military expenditure or to tax the incomes or real estate of the rich’ (PS, 155). By encouraging rapid increases in exports, SAPs also contributed to a collapse in the world prices of primary commodities ‘due to a large increase in their supplies’; SAPped economies exported more but earned less.45 But the SAPs achieved their real objective. Protectionist restrictions on foreign investment were summarily demolished so that, as Walden Bello explains, African economies might be ‘blasted open’ by first-world capital, domestic entrepreneurial groups weakened and thus Africa fully subordinated to ‘the North-dominated world economy’.46 The endemic debt crises of African and Latin American economies in the 1980s and 1990s were also a means of redistributing assets on a massive global scale and of feeding the reckless financialisation of first-world economies. David Harvey estimates that this version of ‘trickle up’ economics has actually resulted in nearly $5 trillion (the equivalent of more than fifty Marshall Plans) being sent by these economies to their first-world creditors.47 The loans granted to third-world governments by these ‘bad Samaritans’ look pretty generous until one realises that the very purpose of those loans was to furnish a pretext for removing impediments to foreign ‘investment’ in the postcolonial world and to transfer the public assets

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of the poorest nations on earth gratis to Western banks and corporations. The stated aim of structural adjustment, particularly as set out in the World Bank’s Berg Report of 1981, was to solve the debt crises in Africa’s failing economies. Devaluation would correct the balance of payments while tighter fiscal policies would reduce government deficits and tame inflation. Market liberalisation would bring about growth. Yet structural adjustment did not lead to recovery or development, alleviate poverty or deal with health crises. Nor did it encourage foreign direct investment, except in areas in which high returns can be guaranteed for international capital such as resource extraction where the wider effects of that investment are either paltry or positively deleterious. Moreover, structural adjustment was also much more likely to exacerbate problems of capital flight.48 Indeed Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce estimate that half the money entering sub-Saharan Africa in the form of foreign loans since 1970 exited almost immediately as capital flight, much of this flight capital even ending up in the same banks that arranged the loans.49 Much of this debt is technically odious in any case, since it was contracted by undemocratic regimes; successor regimes are therefore, under international law, not liable to pay it. Nonetheless debt has siphoned resources away from investment in infrastructure, education and health care. Indebtedness became a permanent crisis during this period: Sub-Saharan Africa’s total foreign debt rose from $61 billion in 1980 to $177 billion in 1990.50 Frequently derided as failures, SAPs were in fact ‘fundamentally successful’ at resubordinating the Global South.51 As Fantu Cheru has argued, structural adjustment and its epigones violated any number of fundamental human rights detailed in the Universal Declaration, including the right to education and the right to health; the reduction in public health expenditure led, for example, to a ‘brain drain’ of qualified health care professionals to the West and thus compounded the HIV/AIDS pandemic.52 SAPs also violated political rights. In most cases they were accompanied by state repression against the urban poor, students and trade unionists. Undiluted market fundamentalism is of course inimical to the interests and aspirations of the people it most directly affects: as the late Nigerian activist Claude Ake has written, ‘there is no way of implementing the structural adjustment programme without repression’.53 John Walton and David Seddon count 146 ‘IMF riots’ in 39 indebted countries between 1976 and 1992, including food riots, demonstrations and general strikes.54 In this period

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the state abandoned its responsibility for development and redistribution but retained its roles in quelling dissent and facilitating the returns of local elites and foreign firms. Introducing his extended critique of the global financial institutions, Joseph Stiglitz points out that the wave of protests that erupted against those institutions in the years after the demonstrations against the meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999 were novel only because they took place in the developed world; protests against austerity programmes had been shaking the underdeveloped world for the previous two decades.55 Thus continuing economic underdevelopment has gone hand in hand with continuing political underdevelopment, that is, state repression. Neil Smith has provided a very sobering summary of events since independence in what he refers to as ‘the veritable ghetto of global capital’: Denied access to more than a trickle of capital on the global markets, yet condemned to resolve the local consequences of an earlier global adventurism by colonial powers, much of this region has experienced the message of modernization and globalization at its most cruelly satanic. The promise of prosperity in exchange for structural adjustment has brought the obverse of social development, the underbelly of globalization… The brutal ghettoization of sub-Saharan Africa in the global economy has many sides. It has been marked by the production and maintenance of extreme scarcities; sometimes vicious social struggles over access to place and power; the rigid crystallization of ethnic, class, and regional identities; repressive and often corrupt postcolonial governments built on the exploitation of scarcity and backed by military power; and serious warfare in virtually every state in the last two decades. Nor do the most direct and densest connections into the global economy bring immunity; Nigeria and South Africa have in different ways been central to the penetration of capital into sub-Saharan Africa, but the populations of both have paid dearly in the process.56

Africa’s newly independent nations found themselves (and still find themselves) in a world economic system characterised by a profoundly unequal distribution of political and economic power. Truly, ‘decolonisation’ would be the wrong word to describe this process.

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‘Virtual Democracy’ The declared aim of ‘structural adjustment’ was to reduce the size of the state and thus create a flood of private investment as well as liberate the energies of some nebulous entity called ‘civil society’. Nicholas van de Walle’s definitive study of structural adjustment shows, however, that this process has had the opposite effect. The infliction of severe austerity in addition to African states’ withdrawal ‘from basic developmental activities’ in order to focus expenditures ‘entirely on government consumption’57 has increased corruption in addition to inflating both the bureaucracy and the state’s repressive functions.58 Where they take place multiparty elections are frequently a mere camouflage for the uninterrupted rule of a country’s incumbent elite, whereas party allegiances are sometimes further manifestations of clientelism. The state still looms over the people but it no longer pretends to perform any developmental role, except insofar as it presides over a much-trumpeted process of ‘growth’ that is in reality both superficial and restricted to elites. ‘The neoliberal state’, as Prashad argues, ‘now stakes itself more on repression than on responsiveness. Its role is as a crime fighter and a warrior against subversion’.59 Western commentators and politicians routinely bemoan the continued shortage of democracy in Africa but too few of them ask how representative are the activities there of the IMF and the World Bank. The latter, for example, is ‘virtually unaccountable to the majority of its members, the developing countries toward whom the Bank plays a commanding role’. With leverage over a country’s laws, its fiscal and budgetary policies and so on, the staff of the World Bank ‘appears to many in the former colonized world reminiscent of the colonial civil service’.60 As Ha-Joon Chang puts it, ‘most of the African economies have been practically run by the IMF and the World Bank over the past quarter of a century’.61 African governments have had one and often two hands tied behind their backs by these institutions. To use the anthropologist James Ferguson’s word, they are literally ‘demoralizing’62 ; they replace a moral and political with a technocratic rhetoric for thinking about the actions of African governments. The current fixation with ‘good governance’ in Africa covers up the fact that a government that is good is not one that obediently does the bidding of a remote regime of invigilators but one that responds to the needs and aspirations of its voters. The emphasis of reform in Africa, as

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Agbese and Klay Kieh have argued, should not be on ‘good governance’ but on ‘democratic governance’.63 The point is not that Africa needs new or better leaders. Rather, the criterion by which those leaders are evaluated should be their willingness or otherwise (as well as their ability) to heed the demands and aspirations of their electorates and thereby begin finally to overturn the legacies of colonial rule. According to the World Bank: Good governance includes the creation, protection, and enforcement of property rights, without which the scope for market transactions is limited. It includes the provision of a regulatory regime that works with the market to promote competition. And it includes the provision of sound macroeconomic policies that create a stable environment for market activity. Good governance also means the absence of corruption, which can subvert the goals of policy and undermine the legitimacy of the public institutions that support markets.64

It is clear from this peremptory list of demands that ‘good governance’ is just another way of saying ‘obedience to the requirements of international capital’. Even corruption is described as undesirable only insofar as it hampers capital accumulation, though of course the maintenance in power of narrow state elites whose function is to facilitate the accumulation of capital by foreign firms is what causes graft in the first place. The vapid term ‘governance’ is a poor substitute for its perfectly serviceable synonym, democracy, which is properly speaking not a mere label affixed to governments that submissively do the bidding of the ‘markets’ (another euphemism) or even to governments that permit minimum standards of political rights. ‘Democracy’ refers in fact to states that allow for the maximum amount of participation in determining a country’s political and economic priorities. That is still not the case in contemporary Africa, where economic ‘liberalisation’ and underdevelopment (which are sides of the same coin) persist in spite of ostensible transitions to democracy. Mobutu can no longer be seen strolling through the Chinese pavilions of his absurd jungle Xanadu at Gbadolite and Bokassa no longer sits atop his golden throne in Bangui. No African leader before 1990, outside of Mauritius and apartheid South Africa, had lost power in an election; in the next six years eighteen were removed at the ballot box.65 But it would be a profound mistake to think that the fall of such despots or the ‘good governance agenda’ or even the ostensible rebirth of political pluralism on

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the continent in the last thirty years has made African states substantially more democratic, let alone substantially more equal. It would also be an error to assume that the emphasis now placed by the World Bank and IMF on ‘democracy’ and ‘participation’ signalled a desire to renounce the rapacious priorities of structural adjustment. Granted, a great deal of change for the better has taken place. But that does not mean that the many African states now trumpeting slogans about ‘development’ and ‘pluralism’, though they are clearly a substantial improvement on the tyrannical fiefdoms of Mobutu and Bokassa, are anything other than continuations of what one might call the structurally dictatorial character of the state in Africa. Rita Abrahamsen goes so far as to claim that these neoliberal technocracies are ‘an intrinsic part of the technologies of power employed in international politics and one of the ways in which the North maintains and legitimises its continued power and hegemony in the South’.66 The systems of electoral democracy introduced in many African states over the last twenty odd years, Abrahamsen argues, are unlikely to result in representative government, still less in social justice, not just because those competing for power are usually members of existing elites but also because real power resides elsewhere, with those countries’ donors and creditors and with the first-world corporations that control their economies. Thandika Mkandawire calls such states ‘choiceless democracies’.67 They have also been dubbed ‘virtual democracies’.68 For Abrahamsen they are ‘exclusionary democracies’,69 possessing political competition but little responsiveness to the will of the majority. What this clutch of adjectives indicates is that while NGOs, the World Bank and IMF (joined since 1995 by the World Trade Organization) and liberal Western leaders happily bemoan the mote in African eyes, denounce corruption and dictatorship, extol the virtues of free elections and a free press, civil society and the rule of law, their talk of ‘democracy’ is empty unless and until they are willing to address the gigantic beam that distorts their own vision, i.e. international structures and relations of power. To invoke Ellen Meiksins Wood’s distinction, democracy has been applied to the political but not to the economic sphere; so confined, it atrophies and ends up referring to little more than occasional contests between more or less identical platforms. Many African governments, as Abrahamsen argues, are ‘faced with two irreconcilable constituencies: external donors and creditors and their newly empowered domestic poor’. They are dependent on the former for vital financial assistance and on the latter for votes. Donors demand

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the economic ‘liberalisation’ that is likely to antagonise electorates that understandably crave greater social and economic equality. The solution for those governments is to restrict the democratic space to superficial ‘consultations’, sporadic or fraudulent ballots, and contests over which party gets to distribute the spoils of office to its supporters. Democracy persists ‘but it is often fragile and exclusionary, stumbling from crisis to crisis and unable to include the poor in any meaningful way’.70 We are obliged to conclude that ‘democratisation’ and ‘good governance’ are just humanitarian facades that mask the unrelentingly predatory intentions of financial institutions and Western governments. Look at the latest incarnations of structural adjustment, the bewildering alphabet soup of Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facilities (ESAFs), Poverty Reduction and Growth Facilities (PRGFs), Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), Extended Credit Facilities (ECFs), Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiatives and Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union. These ‘innovations designed to ensure that lending programs are pro-poor and in line with each country’s own strategy for reducing poverty’,71 in the IMF’s words, are in reality just so much ‘windowdressing’.72 The global financial institutions continue to pursue what Chang calls a ‘Henry Ford approach to diversity’,73 where African states can have any loan or debt relief conditionality they like so long as it’s a neoliberal one. The local consultation and participation so loudly trumpeted by these ‘innovations’ usually takes place behind closed doors with unaccountable NGOs, transnational aid agencies and finance ministry ‘experts’ whose backgrounds, outlooks and interests hardly differ from those of World Bank and IMF bureaucrats. This is ‘imperialism by email’,74 to borrow Arundhati Roy’s striking phrase: a depoliticised ‘partnership’ managed by an alliance of donors, global financial institutions and a narrow stratum of technocratic national politicians and bureaucrats. It is a situation in which democracy ceases to denote a substantive conversation or struggle to do with ideas and goals and becomes synonymous with an ‘anaestheticised’75 process of ‘information sharing’.76 The so-called reforms of the IMF and World Bank since the turn of the century have been mostly cosmetic. Miserly levels of debt relief go hand in hand with the usual restrictive conditionalities while the PRSPs negotiated by ‘partnerships’ between the World Bank, IMF and government officials ‘turned out to be nothing more than an effort to add a veneer of public participation and anti-poverty rhetoric to the same

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technocratic process and model’77 focused on deregulation, trade liberalisation, the free movement of capital, the restriction of public spending and ownership, export-orientated growth and the accelerated commodification of land and resources.78 ‘In short’, in Abrahamsen’s words, ‘the PRSPs continue to operate within the neo-liberal paradigm of structural adjustment’.79 A focus on the Global South study found that the commitment of the World Bank and the IMF to participation in the planning and implementation of ‘poverty reduction strategies’ was at best skin deep. [E]xperience from countries where the process has already started shows that participation to date has involved little more than consultations with a few prominent CSOs [Civil Society Organisations], rather than broad-based, substantive public dialogue about the causes or incidence of poverty. Local civil society organisations such as labour unions, peasant organisations, social movements, women’s groups and indigenous people’s organisations have not been invited into the process, and the little public discussion that has taken place has been limited to well-resourced national and international non-government organisations (NGOs). The insertion of foreign donors and creditors between civil society and capital deficit governments creates conditions whereby the influence of local civil society in setting national development agendas is weakened, and national governments become less accountable to their own citizens than to international creditors and donors.80

Other verdicts have been even more damning. Branch and Mampilly see NGOs as a way of disempowering political and social movements. NGOs may slightly ameliorate the effects of extreme deprivation but they do little to prevent it. They absolve states of their duty to ensure the welfare of their citizens, they establish new forms of patronage and by focusing on micro-credit lending schemes they discourage collective political action.81 NGOs erect a façade of inclusion and participation behind which stingy concessions are granted and, as Mike Davis argues, a more substantive debate about causes and solutions is actively averted. For all the glowing rhetoric about democratization, self-help, social capital, and the strengthening of civil society, the actual power relations in this new NGO universe resemble nothing so much as traditional clientelism. Moreover, like the community organizations patronized by the War on Poverty in the 1960s, Third World NGOs have proven brilliant at coopting local leadership as well as hegemonizing the social space traditionally occupied by the Left. (PS, 76)

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Looked at this way, the whole ‘consultative’ and ‘participatory’ ‘human development’ regime of NGOs, repackaged SAPs and highly conditional debt forgiveness is a substitute for democracy. It is a decoy that distracts attention from (and therefore aggravates) Africa’s continuing subordination to economic priorities determined by external powers, i.e. the reduction of the state to a coercive, market-friendly conduit and the accelerating commodification of land, labour and resources. In Saul’s words, the mendacious rhetoric of poverty reduction and democratic empowerment ‘changes little that is essential to the overall project: the sustained downgrading of the claims of the social vis-à-vis the counter-claims of the market’.82 That project may well facilitate spectacular, albeit short-term and unevenly distributed spurts of economic ‘growth’ but it is extremely unlikely to result in sustainable development, let alone the reduction of poverty. Needless to say, the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations in 2000 did not succeed in eradicating poverty in heavily indebted countries by 2015 or indeed in substantial progress towards any of its ambitious goals to empower women, ensure access to primary education and so on. Sustainable Development Goals will now set about failing to eradicate poverty by 2030. The fundamental problem with this blizzard of earnest development initiatives is that they are all premised on achieving growth and development within the political and economic structures inherited and substantially unaltered from the colonial period.83 They definitely do not make the whole paradigm of deregulation and privatisation, of agro-mineral dependency and compliance with the ‘world market’ available for ‘consultation’. Every good intention of the MDGs, as Samir Amin’s meticulous analysis makes clear, is subjected to ‘a condition that empties it of any meaning’. The laudable ambition to ‘provide access to affordable essential drugs’, for example, is immediately undermined by the stipulation that this should be done ‘in cooperation with the pharmaceutical industry’, the very monopolies that prevent access to such drugs in the first place! The real goal of such pious initiatives, argues Amin, is to reduce the state ‘to narrow police functions’ and the guaranteeing of debt service.84 If the much-trumpeted commitment to democracy was anything other than a willingness to parley with like-minded technocrats and NGOs then authentically representative social and political movements might be granted an opportunity to point out that it is in reality those very structures of political and economic power that are the source of the

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continent’s persistent underdevelopment. As Paul Cammack has argued, capitalist ‘development’ is being promoted ‘as a solution for the very conditions – poverty and inequality on a global scale – that it itself produces’.85 Needless to say, official ‘participations’ and ‘consultations’ are deaf to such voices.86 Thus in 2002 African social movements, trade unions, youth and women’s organisations castigated the African Union’s own New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) for overlooking the fact that the cause of Africa’s underdevelopment was its continued exploitation by multinational capital. NEPAD [i]gnores the way the state has, itself, been undermined as a social provider and vehicle for development, particularly under the World Bank’s tutelage; ignores the way that the structurally adjusted African state has, in turn, been undermining institutions and processes of democracy in Africa; does not reflect the historic struggles in Africa for participatory forms of democracy and decentralization of power; promises of democracy and good governance are largely intended to satisfy foreign donors and to give guarantees to foreign investment.87

The root of the problem then, is the absence of democracy. What is required are not governments compelled by strict conditionalities to cut health and education budgets, privatise assets and liberalise trade and financial flows, but opportunities for dispossessed and marginalised social groups to put in place accountable governments capable of engineering development and reducing poverty with the tried-and-tested methods of public ownership, wealth redistribution, investment in services and infrastructure, land reform and the empowerment of women. It goes without saying, of course, that the even more ambitious goal of restructuring the world economy does not make it onto the agenda of the official ‘consultations’. ‘Imperialism is the problem’, as the South African activist Trevor Ngwane has said, ‘a partnership with it cannot be a solution’.88

Africa’s Unfinished Revolution Dictatorship, to use a Gramscian idiom, is a phenomenon of the interregnum. And the period since independence, in Africa and the rest of the world, has been nothing if not an interregnum in which, in Gramsci’s celebrated formulation, the old order is dying and the new one

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cannot yet be born.89 For Gramsci, dictatorships are a response to democratic pressure. All dictatorships, though the Italian Marxist is concerned above all of course with fascism, come into being because of the presence not the absence of democratic pressures. Gramsci argues in the Prison Notebooks that since the Risorgimento Italian liberalism had never managed to command the consent of the subordinate classes. In the political and economic crisis after the First World War the ruling class could not mobilise their support and it thus invited a third force, fascism, to resolve the situation. What Gramsci calls ‘Caesarism’ therefore results from the threats posed to a ruling bloc by crisis and the prospect of revolution.90 Caesarism derives from the weakness of the state or at least from the state’s inability to exercise hegemony by successfully disguising its ‘economic-corporate’ interests.91 The crisis of the state may lead to revolution or to Caesarism or even to a fascist dictatorship that enlists the energies and aspirations of revolution.92 Eqbal Ahmad insists in Gramscian vein that in the Third World after independence what he calls ‘the neofascist system emerged in reaction to organized popular demands for fundamental economic and social change’.93 Wherever nationalist regimes, whether in the Congo, Iran, Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, etc., have threatened to implement capital controls or nationalise key resources, reactionary forces have stepped in to take control with the open or covert support of powerful states in the West. Indeed, the movement for decolonisation that swept the world in the decades after the Second World War usually resulted in the triumph of these reactionary forces over the more militant aspirations of much of their rank and file. Almost all anti-colonial revolutions have been, to use another term of Gramsci’s, ‘passive revolutions’. This term, as JeanFrançois Bayart has argued, is extremely useful in the African context. It ‘synthesises the “educated” people’s rise to power, their seizure of state resources, and their refusal to enhance and radicalize the popular movements against colonialism’. It also ‘explains the process whereby the ‘educated’ group reached an understanding with those who held power previously, and how this process was reproduced on a larger scale’.94 Such states, in Ahmad’s words, are not just subsidiary but ‘suspended’: controlled and artificially held back, tethered to a process of development that is dictated by and that serves external powers.95 Their aim is to frustrate the democratic aspirations that brought postcolonial nation states into being in the first place.

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No iron law of history decreed that independence in Africa would bring continuing dependency and state repression. Repressive states first had to do battle with the democratic aspirations of populations whose political horizons had been opened up by the struggle against European rule. Such states won those battles because they had powerful allies and because many of Africa’s rulers were unscrupulous enough to want to continue playing the role they had acted out under the previous dispensation, in Fanon’s cutting words that of ‘the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent’.96 The history of Africa after independence, Davidson argues in The Black Man’s Burden, his classic study of nationalism in Africa, is the history of its elites’ sometimes eager and sometimes reluctant, sometimes intentional and sometimes inadvertent acceptance of the legacy of the colonial partition of the continent into nations and states, the perils of which many movements and thinkers had foreseen but which, alas, they could not prevent. Africa’s liberation movements did not fail, Davidson argues; they were defeated, given that they had been handicapped from the start by arbitrary frontiers, bureaucratic structures, the extreme centralisation of economic and political power, and forms of clientelism nurtured by colonial divide and rule (mistaken by unsympathetic onlookers in the West for ‘tribalism’). Moreover, the economies to which they became heir were, as we have seen, locked tightly into relationships of subordination with the former colonial powers and into terms of trade settled without regard to Africa’s needs and potentials. This is still the case. As Mark Curtis has argued, ‘the currently dominant Northern-promoted “development” policies in the South – especially structural adjustment and the trading regime of the WTO – are intended to promote Northern interests specifically, and entail the prevention of the prospects for meaningful development and reduction of poverty in the Third World’.97 All in all, Africa’s peoples have been beset for decades by Western powers’ fear of radical innovation and by those powers’ consequent ‘determination to oppose and if possible prevent any development, whether political or economic, that could seem likely to undermine Africa’s subordination to the “world market”’.98 None of this means, of course, that the history of postcolonial Africa was somehow predetermined. When it comes to attributing blame for the inability of even the most radical and clear-sighted postcolonial regimes to devise alternatives to authoritarian state power, Aijaz Ahmad does not let the internal failings of the doctrines, methods and plans adopted by,

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for example, the Marxist-Leninist movements that took power in Lusophone Africa off the hook. But those failings, he adds, need to be placed in the context of the unremitting hostility of a global economic system controlled by Western states.99 This consolidation and expansion [of capitalism] in all the homelands of advanced capital, reflected as much in the imperialist machine as in the globalized corporate economy, meant that throughout this period capital was to command enormous power to condemn every country which even attempted to introduce socialism to a perpetual war economy under conditions of acute scarcity and low levels of social development, with no prior experience of even a bourgeois democracy, let alone a socialist one.100

‘Pauperised’ and ‘sequestered’, these new states surrendered to political regimentation, corruption and economic disorder. Ahmad goes on to remind us that what happened in parts of Africa happened elsewhere in the postcolonial world, most appallingly in Vietnam, a land ‘utterly devastated’ ‘in all its human and natural resources’101 by a genocidal war of aggression. In short, ‘[n]one of the small places where great revolutions had occurred had the space, the time, the material resources, the assistance, the conditions of peace to make possible the corrections of the distortions which inevitably arise in the course of collective human projects of such magnitude, undertaken in conditions so very punishing’.102 Men and women make their own history, I am anxious to stress, though not, Marx’s indispensable formulation adds, in circumstances of their own choosing. History is not inevitable but nor is contingent quite the right word for it. Our understanding of postcolonial African history as a scene of unfinished struggle between groups as well as struggle over competing definitions of liberation will be better served by a conceptual language that emphasises the crucial tensions at given moments between alternative possibilities and structural constraints (both material and ideological). The deformities that afflicted the postcolonial state in Africa from the very moment of its birth were due not, as is commonly assumed, to the fact that the colonial powers left too quickly but to the fact that they left far too slowly and reluctantly and that in most cases they did not really leave at all. Instead those powers constrained their former colonies’ independence with a legacy of authoritarian institutions, with the destruction and prevention of democratic movements, and with continued relations

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of subordination in the economic sphere. At independence African states had to start almost from scratch to fashion democratic institutions, to build economies sufficiently diverse and self-sufficient to engineer development, and to set up the schemes for employment and housing as well as the modern health and education services demanded by the masses whose sacrifices had brought independence about. They were obliged to do all this while vastly stronger antagonists did everything in their power to place obstacles in the way. None of this serves to exonerate Africa’s rulers. But my point is that the venality and lust for power of many of these groups cannot be understood without reference to the larger world-system for which, under colonial rule and since, they have acted as intermediaries.103 Only a ‘structural determinist’ would let those elites off the hook by looking exclusively at the imperialist world-system with which they are in cahoots: ‘that would allow liberation movement elites to rationalize their own passage into privileged positions within a process of post-liberation domestic class formation with the excuse that “Imperialism made me do it”’.104 ‘Nor’, Saul goes on, ‘should we underestimate the cruel constraints imposed by the fact that global capitalist hegemony is at its strongest in Africa and that western capital is reinforced in its power by working with and through the complex domestic structures of class and other divisions’. Although the national ‘elites’ must bear responsibility for their part in the failure to realize liberationist ideals’, as Tamara Sivanandan has argued, ‘one must not underestimate the pressures of the institutions they inherited, and the continuing and constitutive presence of imperialism as a world system’.105 So if we are to understand the prevalence of authoritarian state structures in postcolonial Africa then the pervasiveness and durability of imperialism must be where we start. In trying to make sense of this regrettably longue durée, I have found Giovanni Arrighi’s oeuvre to be completely indispensable. The great strength of Arrighi’s work, to my mind, is that it’s one of the only accounts that enables us to see the reassertion of imperialist domination over Africa in the broader context of what he calls a US-led ‘capitalist counter-offensive’ since the 1970s against the aspirations of socialist and social democratic movements in the first world and against the revolutionary ideals of national liberation in the third world. Authoritarian state structures are not an accidental hangover from the colonial period, let alone a peculiarly African malady, but an essential feature of the

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neoliberal epoch. Arrighi presents neoliberalism as a concerted worldwide campaign waged by the owners and representatives of capital to counteract a serious crisis of profitability that began to afflict world capitalism at the end of the 1960s. This conjuncture emerges from Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994) and Adam Smith in Beijing (2007) as a profound and systemic as well as potentially existential political and economic crisis for capital, one brought about by the profitsqueezing aspiration of workers for full employment and high wages in the first world and in the postcolonial world by the real prospect that revolutionary movements might seize control over their nations’ resources. Arrighi’s wider argument is that the development and expansion of the capitalist world economy has been undertaken since the fifteenth century at the behest of a series of militarily powerful hegemons, from Italian city states in alliance with the armed power of Portugal and Spain to the Netherlands, Great Britain and latterly the United States. Each phase or cycle of accumulation comes to an end because of the tendency of capital to be accumulated beyond the means of reinvesting it profitably within the limits of existing territorial systems (ASB, 217).106 New outlets for the profitable investment of surplus capital are found either through financialisation or through imperial expansion. Until now, when the limits of existing territorial systems have been reached new hegemons have come into being with the financial and military capacity to preside over a further period of expansion. Arrighi’s model sounds deterministic but his basic point is that there are intrinsic structural and systemic limits to the long phases or cycles of accumulation in the history of world capitalism. When those limits are approached, the system is faced with political choices or rather struggles over the military and financial supremacy of hegemonic power. Systemic problems of capital accumulation have bedevilled the UScentred regime of accumulation since the late 1960s. The crisis was caused in part by the increasing unsustainability (in the United States and elsewhere) of the post-war compromise between capital and labour, whereby strong trade unions, full employment and historically high wages were squeezing profits (ASB, 134). There were three main fronts in the counter-offensive, Arrighi shows. The first was the effort to shackle trade unions and control wage growth. The second front witnessed a campaign ‘to contain, through the use of force, the joint challenge of nationalism

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and communism in the Third World’ (ASB, 134) and in so doing frustrate the desire of previously colonised peoples to own and control their own resources. We are also talking about an imperialist counter-offensive therefore. The third front was a massive reversal in the direction of global capital flows. By the end of the 1960s the United States was no longer in a position to play the role it had discharged in the years after the Second World War when it had exported its surplus capital in the form of direct investment to its allies and protégés, not least Japan and Germany, whose debts it forgave and who also benefited from substantial Marshall Plan aid. From being the world economy’s main creditor in the years after the war and thus the main engine of global expansion American political elites took the audacious decision in the early 70s to turn the United States into the world’s main debtor. Previously the United States had recycled its surplus capital in Europe and Asia. That surplus had now disappeared so it proceeded to massively expand its deficits (aided by Nixon’s decision to ditch the gold standard in 1971 and the consequent collapse of the Bretton Woods regime of fixed exchange rates). The United States paid for those deficits by sucking in capital from the surplus economies of Japan, Germany, South Korea, the Gulf States and later China. This inflow of capital was used to buy up US Treasury bonds and was also turned into investments in US corporations as well as being funnelled towards Wall Street where it was turned into dubious new financial instruments as well as the loans to US consumers that kept mutually beneficial demand for imported commodities so high. This ingenious ruse, what Peter Gowan has dubbed Washington’s ‘global gamble’, was effectively to use Wall Street as well as US government debt and consumer demand to recycle the surplus capital of the manufacturing economies in Europe and South and East Asia.107 It has ensured the US’s continuing financial centrality and military supremacy during this period.108 Those countries that were well-positioned to compete for a share of expanding US demand, like Japan and Germany and later China, prospered, while others, like most of Africa, did not (ASB, 147).109 So, the period of world history since the early 1970s ought to be seen as part of a largely successful ‘capitalist counter-offensive’ intended to counteract relative long-term stagnation and to extend and prolong US control over the world economy. This is no doubt quite a complicated narrative, but it contains one explanation for why Africa turned out to be so much more vulnerable than South and East Asia to the harsher winds that have blown through the world economy since the end of the 1960s.

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In fact that question could be rephrased as a question about who was best placed in this period to compete for a share of US demand for consumer goods. The short answer is: not Africa, because it has been definitively ‘peripheralised’ over the last century (its role being to provide a continuous supply of low-cost primary commodities) and because, to this end, its economies were being bled dry by structural adjustment. East Asia did not share Africa’s almost total dependence on foreign capital. Not only did it possess a large, flexible, low-cost and highly educated workforce, Arrighi shows that East Asia also possessed an indigenous stratum of entrepreneurs ‘capable of mobilizing the labour supply for capital accumulation within the region’.110 If the ‘reserve army’ of new proletarians was provided by the low-cost, low-regulation economies of Asia then an even grimmer fate awaited much of Africa, where un-, semi- and formerly employed workers were reduced to destitution by the continent’s indebtedness: ‘now fully commodified’, in Fredric Jameson’s words, ‘at the same time that they are blighted and devastated’.111 As we have seen, the ‘weak’ states bequeathed to sub-Saharan Africa were scarcely suited to performing any kind of developmental role. By contrast, many states in East Asia, notably Taiwan and South Korea, had benefitted from lavish American aid during the early stages of the Cold War as well as privileged access to the US domestic market. The United States even tolerated its allies’ protectionism and interventionism, favours it certainly did not grant to Africa.112 Arrighi’s account of the unprecedented expansion of the world economy in the decades after 1945 and of the prolonged crisis of that cycle of accumulation since the early 1970s is one of the very few versions of that narrative that recognises the central role played in it by struggles for and against meaningful decolonisation in Africa and elsewhere. It is worth recalling that Arrighi worked in the 1960s firstly at the University College of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in Salisbury (now Harare) and then, after his deportation from Rhodesia in 1966, in what must have been the extremely exciting environment of Dar es Salaam alongside important figures like Immanuel Wallerstein, Martin Legassick, Walter Rodney and John Saul.113 Arrighi’s early work had explored the contradictory process of capitalist development in Southern Africa in the context of Africa’s ‘peripheral’ role in the capitalist world-system.114 His account of the paradoxical effects of the proletarianisation of the African peasantry in Rhodesia formed the basis of what Arrighi has since called ‘the Southern African paradigm of accumulation by dispossession’.115

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Arrighi and Saul’s classic and extremely prescient Essays in the Political Economy of Africa of 1973 had warned that in independent Africa economic surpluses were being absorbed not only by foreign firms but also by the high consumption of labour aristocracies and bureaucratic urban elites.116 Africa’s dependency on world demand for primary products was being exacerbated by a pattern of surplus absorption that was restraining agricultural productivity and the growth of domestic markets. If this pattern of ‘perverse growth’ (growth that was inequitable and that entrenched dependency) was to be tackled then the privileges of these classes also had to be addressed, no easy task in view of how those classes and the economies over which they presided were integrated into global commodity chains. In other words, such were the established forms of ownership of the means of production in the periphery and in the industrial centres, Arrighi knew from the moment of independence that Africa’s prospects of prospering within a capitalist world economy were decidedly bleak. The more closely connected were the economies of ‘Tropical Africa’ to that worldwide system, the more dependent and unequal and therefore the less, in any truly substantive sense, developed they would become. Whatever surpluses were generated would be spirited abroad or else frittered away on conspicuous and non-essential consumption by a tiny and privileged section of the population. [W]hatever the situation might be during the so-called phase of easy import substitution, foreign investment will increasingly become a mere device for transferring surplus generated in Tropical Africa to the investing country… In consequence, the bias of the emerging pattern of investment in favor of capital intensity and against the capital-goods industry cannot be expected to lead, in the long run, to a faster growth of wage and salary-employment; it will simply allow a larger outflow of surplus from the area and growing incomes for a small and, in relative terms, constant or contracting section of the working population. This type of growth, which, as we have seen, already characterizes Tropical Africa, we shall call growth without development.117

Capital accumulation continued to take place but at the expense of the independence generation’s desires for more egalitarian forms of political and economic development. For Arrighi then, it is the uneven and unremittingly imperialist worldsystem as a whole and not this or that isolated aspect or region of that

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system that constitutes the most important unit of analysis if one is seeking to understand Africa’s economic and political travails since independence. As William G. Martin argues, both that world-system itself and the analysis of it by thinkers who did their formative work in and on the continent in the period leading up to and just after independence, have ‘deep African roots’.118 Both Arrighi and Wallerstein sought to make sense of the experience of the colonial relationship, resistance against it… and the endurance of colonial-like, world-economic relations after nationalist parties obtained state power. In many ways the emergence of the worldsystems perspective arose to offer a mode of conceptualizing the historic reach of such world-relationships, in a period when formal colonial relationships had given way to a liberal celebration of sovereign, developing states.119

In other words, those states’ sovereignty and their capacity to develop within the world-system as it was currently constituted were precisely the dogmas that the new approach of world-systems analysis endeavoured to contest. We should learn to see the post-independence period as a moment of profound global political and economic crisis in which the deepest contradictions of the capitalist world-system itself were briefly made visible. Newly empowered working classes were squeezing first-world capital while insurgent liberation movements in the third world threatened to seize control of their own resources. Either profits and rents would be made to concede ground before these radical democratic-egalitarian aspirations or radical democratic-egalitarian aspirations would be defeated by powerful states that sought above everything else to protect profits and rents. What is clear from Arrighi’s account is his claim that the effective ‘recolonization’ of Africa during this period was a specific response to the revolutionary threat of decolonisation and thus part of a general effort to shore up the capitalist world-system against these emergent political and economic projects. The immiseration of Africa since the 70s has been a central part of the rich world’s response to an existential crisis in world capitalism itself and therefore an aspect of a concerted attempt to restore the system’s profitability and by so doing ensure its longevity. The history of Africa since independence cannot be understood without also analysing the efforts of ruling elites in the world’s major powers (as well as their local proxies) ‘to cope with the problems posed by world-wide decolonization’ (LTC, 331).

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‘1968’, le debut d’une lutte prolongée We need to recognise the continued force and attraction of the original goals of anti-colonial liberation that have been forced into retreat over the last four decades. Wallerstein uses ‘1968’ as a kind of shorthand or metonym for those goals. The events of 1968, he argues, were ‘a prelude, better, a rehearsal of things to come’.120 Wallerstein characterises 1968 as an abortive world revolution no less, the moment when the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, the impossibility of maintaining profitable conditions for the accumulation of capital while satisfying the world’s people’s demands for equality, democracy and development, became quite obvious and thus produced for a time, in Fredric Jameson’s words, ‘an immense freeing or unbinding of social energies’.121 Even in the first world ‘1968’ signified the unprecedented visibility and intolerableness of the underlying tension between democracy and capitalism. What Wolfgang Streeck calls ‘democratic capitalism’ had sought after the Second World War to combine two incompatible regimes of resource allocation, one operating according to the criterion of social need and the other according to the requirements of capital accumulation.122 The desire for full employment, a secure income and decent public services as well as for a modicum of social equality, helped to bring about an existential crisis of profitability in this period, a situation that effectively presented the peoples of the first world with a choice between renewed freedom for capital or much greater freedom from capital. Even in its own terms, the class compromise between capital and labour on which post-war prosperity depended increasingly did not work. By the 1970s it could not control inflation. Nor could it prevent fiscal crises or ensure full employment. The democratic and egalitarian aspirations of labour were manifestly incompatible with the requirements of capital accumulation. Indeed that truce had been predicated on the economically (not to mention ecologically) unsustainable principle of endless accumulation. It was intolerable on other grounds too, relying as it did on a sexist division of labour, on a bourgeois and heteronormative model of the family, on the exclusion and exploitation of immigrants and racial minorities, on the continued subordination of the poor world and on the painful repression entailed by wage labour and the ersatz gratifications of consumerism. The compromise formations of first-world social democracy were revealed in ‘1968’ to be not only unsustainable but also intolerable, morally and politically. Hence the myriad of radical initiatives

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in the first world, the feminist movement, civil rights struggles against racism and for gay liberation, environmental activism and the untying of conservative cultural and social strictures of all kinds. These realisations and ambitions are the specifically first-world manifestations of ‘1968’. The first-world 1960s is thus the moment when the clashing regimes of democracy and capital entered into a state of profound and irreconcilable tension, when for a time it seemed as though the former might actually be victorious (in the shape of a democratised state, workers’ control and an irreversible shift in class power) though as we know it was the latter, alas, that ultimately prevailed. Similarly the global 1960s should be understood as the period when the whole structure of post-war capitalism threatened to collapse beneath the weight of the contradiction between the requirements of capital in the first world and the insistent demands for democracy and development in the decolonising world. Neoliberalism, from the mid-1970s onwards, which as Harvey shows ‘was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power’,123 should be understood as an essentially counter-revolutionary project by which the democratic demands of the world’s peoples were subsequently overpowered. The global 1960s first got underway, as Jameson suggests, with decolonisation in British and French Africa and with the Bandung Conference in 1955. It gathered pace with the Cuban revolution and the war of liberation in Algeria and it culminated in what Fanon characterises, exhilaratingly, as the general and organised revolt across the globe of hundreds of millions of men and women against their enslavement by empire and by capital, a herculean (if not always concerted) effort ‘to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers’ (WoE, 253), specifically, the gigantic, long-standing and (within the constraints imposed by capital) hitherto insoluble problem of a catastrophically uneven process of development: This European opulence is literally scandalous, for it has been founded on slavery, it has been nourished by the blood of slaves and it comes directly from the soil and the subsoil of that underdeveloped world. The well-being and the progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races. We have decided not to overlook this any longer. (WoE, 76)

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Cela nous décidons de ne plus l’oublier: now there is a powerful and rousing articulation of the magnificent, world-altering spirit of anti-colonial revolution. Of course the 1960s was also, indeed primarily, a terrain of struggle. That was most obviously and consequentially so in Vietnam of course, where the established order fought tooth and nail to hold back the revolutionary threat of third-world liberation. Alas this threat was successfully repelled for the most part, with means ranging from the application of overwhelming military force in South East Asia (and elsewhere), with support for military dictatorships in South and Central America (and elsewhere), with a repertoire of subversion and manipulation in postcolonial Africa and most of all with the aid of what Arrighi and others present as a wholesale reorganisation of the world economy since the early 1970s that required the ‘recolonisation’ of Africa and in fact a general war on all fronts against the democratic-egalitarian aspirations of the 1960s. Jameson puts this point about the struggles that characterised ‘the 1960s’ (the period, he says, roughly between the late 1950s and around 1974) very pithily, reminding us that ‘decolonization historically went hand in hand with neo-colonialism, and that the graceful, grudging, or violent end of an old-fashioned imperialism certainly meant the end of one kind of domination but evidently also the invention and construction of a new kind – symbolically, something like the replacement of the British Empire by the International Monetary Fund’.124 ‘1968’ was principally a rebellion, an abortive, impulsive and largely uncoordinated rebellion as well as ultimately an unsuccessful one, against the authoritarian or bureaucratic state and against the unequal division of labour and wealth that those states upheld. From Mexico City, Buenos Aires and Montevideo to Rome, Paris, Turin, Prague and several points in between (including Africa), 1968 took aim at states that had shown themselves incapable of fulfilling the political and economic aspirations of their citizens. For those demands to be met, the very existence of capitalism (and of actually existing communism) had to be called into question. The thought figure of ‘1968’ marks for Wallerstein ‘the end of the dream of modernity – not the end of the search for its goals of human liberation and equality, but the end of the faith that the state within the capitalist world-economy could serve as the facilitator and guarantor of steady progress towards achieving these goals’.125 We should see ‘1968’ as the perennial goal of postcolonial or, better still, anti-colonial politics, which is faced with an equally stark choice between the realisation of the authentic goals of liberation or those ideals’ continued suppression

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and frustration. ‘All of world history looks different’, as Susan Andrade suggests, when ‘one regards the 1960s from the different cultural and geographic points of view’ in, for example, West Africa.126 What is usually thought of as a short-lived student rebellion in Paris can then be recognised as a manifestation or expression of a much larger, indeed systemic, crisis in which the contradiction and the choice between democracy and capital became visible with real urgency. Andrade’s reading of the two major West African francophone novels of 1968, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendances and Yambo Ouologuem’s Le devoir de violence takes stock of the disappointment and dissipation of the revolutionary energies of African decolonisation. Or rather, these novels reveal that those energies and aspirations were bound to be frustrated within the constraints of existing economic and political structures (specifically, a capitalist world economy and the undemocratic state). In Andrade’s words, ‘by 1968 the global South strongly prefigured distrust of the state and the belief that the national bourgeoisie was more dangerous than good for the nation’.127 The reorganisation of the world economy since the early 1970s was in large part a response to the vision of a global redistribution of economic power articulated by the programme for a ‘New International Economic Order’ adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1974.128 It has always struck me that the high point and encapsulation of the third-world 1960s were the half-forgotten proposals contained in the NIEO, a prospective ‘trade union of the poor’129 in Julius Nyerere’s words whereby newly independent states might respond to the economic crisis by forming cartels in raw materials and other primary commodities in order ‘to complete the liberation of the Third World countries from external domination’.130 The NIEO proposals sought to aid development in the Global South by stabilising commodity prices, cancelling debts, setting up a system of preferential tariffs that would give third-world manufactures competitive access to first-world markets, legitimising protectionist trade policies and expanding foreign assistance as a form of reparation for European colonialism.131 This is also the period that saw the foundation of the Group of 77 postcolonial states and the adoption by the General Assembly of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as the extraordinarily radical International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

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These proposals and initiatives, often advanced, to be sure, by government elites, would nonetheless have had profoundly revolutionary effects in practice, overturning as they sought to do the entire structure of the world economy and in the process imperilling the long-term prospects of first-world capital. The logical end point of these ideas and schemes was a more egalitarian world-system made possible by more egalitarian dispensations within new nation states. In reality of course the national elites that had inherited the advantages of the colonial period continued to enjoy those advantages in the postcolonial period and the subsequent era of structural adjustment at the expense of the ambitions and needs of their own populations. Prashad has narrated the compelling story of this attempt to overturn the legacies and continuities of imperialism and of how governments in the Global North set about foiling the vision of more equitable forms of development contained in the NIEO proposals. The institutions of the United Nations, especially the General Assembly and The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, were gradually marginalised; the catastrophe of structural adjustment was unleashed; and classic tactics of colonial divide and rule split the least developed countries (LDCs) off from the most developed, in order in Henry Kissinger’s contemptuous words to ‘separate the moderates from the radicals within OPEC, the LDCs from the OPEC countries, and prevent a lot of other “pecs”’.132 A crucial move in the defeat of the NIEO project and therefore in the advent of neoliberalism was the co-opting of the dominant classes in the third-world states, as Prashad argues. The narrative on the origins of neoliberalism formulated by scholars like David Harvey leaves out the role of the demise of the Third World Project, and the enthusiastic commitment to the ideology from the emergent elites in the “global cities”: of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The IMF did not force them into these ideas; they came to them willingly… The elites of the South pushed against the nationalist expectation that they maintain a patriotic and social commitment to the working class and peasantry, whose struggles had won freedom for their countries a generation before.133

Their currencies devalued, government expenditures slashed, interest rates jacked up, wages lowered, subsidies and tariffs demolished, the indebted nation states presided over by these compliant but authoritarian ‘elites’ were now wholly integrated into the world capitalist system. Dreams of

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independent development as well as any plans for tackling the monopolisation of political and economic power by these ‘comprador’ factions receded from view. Those ‘elites’ became managers on behalf of firstworld capital, not leaders in any authentic sense with a sincere or even just a half-hearted commitment to addressing the larger causes of their people’s lasting impoverishment, but overseers or sanctioned chiefs whose privilege it was to take a cut from the profits and rents being passed northwards along the great commodity chains of the world economy. The dynamic of the economic and political crisis of the 1960s is still with us. It follows that the struggle of the 1960s, which as Jameson puts it was ‘a single process at work in First and Third Worlds, in global economy, and in consciousness and culture, a properly dialectical process, in which “liberation” and domination are inextricably entwined’,134 has not definitively been lost and may yet be resumed. The world’s peoples are repeatedly asked to resign themselves to neoliberal ‘reality’, which by and large they have been prepared or at least forced to do, but they might equally conclude that this ‘reality’ itself is at fault and must be transformed. The period since 1968, which is our focus, is one of disenchantment and crisis and of an extraordinarily arduous, difficult and ongoing effort to think through ways of retaining and if possible realising those ideals in the face, we need to be aware, of enormous obstacles at the national, regional and global levels. If it true that in Africa neoliberalism meant inequality, indebtedness, the ruthless assertion of state power, the continued evacuation of commodities to the global economy (to use Trapido’s phrase once more)—in short, all the phenomena that Saul says amount to the continent’s ‘recolonization’—then we are forced to admit that the continuities in Africa’s polities and economies since the late 1960s are at least as conspicuous as the discontinuities and that in fact ‘recolonization’ might be the wrong word since Africa was never definitively decolonised in the first place. The ideals of the abortive ‘world revolution’ of 1968 retain their power and remain to be fulfilled; May 68, as one of the Parisian posters from that time declared, was truly le ‘debut d’une lutte prolongée’. Neoliberalism ‘recolonised’ Africa by reimposing (or rather prolonging) political authoritarianism and economic dependency on the continent. It did so in order to foil ‘anti-systemic’ aspirations for a revolutionary reconstruction of postcolonial nation states and of those nation states’ relationships both with each other and with a dominant first world. We are thus faced again with a stark choice between the

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continuation of imperialist domination and the eventual realisation of the original ideals of anti-colonial liberation. Everything depends on the outcomes of political struggle, which is what these novels, to which we must now finally turn, both describe and potentially arouse.

Notes 1. John Saul, The State and Revolution in Eastern Africa, London: Heinemann, 1979, p. 3. 2. John S. Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle: Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy in Southern Africa, Toronto: Between the Lines, 2005, p. 8. 3. Joe Trapido, ‘Kinshasa’s Theatre of Power’, New Left Review, 98 (2016), 57–80 (p. 57). Two comprehensive accounts of the formidable obstacles placed in the path of Africa’s development since 1945 are Colin Legum’s Africa Since Independence, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999; and Paul Nugent’s Africa Since Independence, London: Palgrave, 2004. 4. Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Three Stages of African Involvement in the World-Economy’, Political Economy of Contemporary Africa, ed. Peter C.W. Gutkind and Immanuel Wallerstein, Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985, pp. 35–63 (p. 55). 5. Eqbal Ahmad, Selected Works, ed. Carrollee Bengelsdorf, Margaret Cerullo and Yogesh Chandrani, New York: Columbia University Press, 2006, p. 123. 6. Ibid., p. 138. 7. Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World, London: Verso, 2001, p. 9. Subsequent references are given in the main text after LVH . 8. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, London: Verso, 2006, pp. 153–154. Subsequent references are given in the main text after PS. 9. The latest scramble for Africa by Western and Chinese firms is a scramble partly for African markets but mainly for African resources, for the continent’s uranium, minerals, timber, biofuels and other agricultural products. Perhaps the only difference between the United States’ approach to the governments of resource-rich states like Angola, Nigeria or Equatorial Guinea (or, say, France’s approach to the uranium-rich Central African Republic) and the approach of China to states like Sudan and Zimbabwe is that China does not feel the same need to mouth hypocritical platitudes about democracy and and human rights while it does business. Despite its support for debt cancellation, its investments in public works and its willingness to detach aid from political and economic conditionalities, China’s desire to secure access to natural resources, especially oil, is at the heart of its presence in the continent.

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10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

The benefits of Chinese investment in extractive industries mainly ‘accrue to state elites’ (466), both authoritarian regimes and ‘hybrid regimes for whom the distribution of patronage remains an exigency of political survival’ (467): ‘China’s economic interests in Africa do not differ substantially from those of Western states’ (476). Denis M. Tull, ‘China’s Engagement in Africa: Scope, Significance and Consequences’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 44:3 (2006), 459–479. For the figures, see Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire, London: Verso, 2012, p. 135; and Gérard Duménil and Dominque Lévy, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution, trans. Derek Jeffers, Harvard University Press, 2004. John S. Saul, Millennial Africa: Capitalism, Socialism, Democracy, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001, p. 25. See Samir Amin, The Law of Worldwide Value, trans. Brian Pearce and Shane Mage, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Bello et al., Dark Victory, p. 2. Susan George, A Fate Worse Than Debt, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, p. 5. Franz Neumann, ‘Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship’, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse, Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957, pp. 233–256 (p. 233). Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt, London: Verso, 2000, p. 32. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005 [1922]. Neumann, ‘Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship’, p. 233. Ibid., p. 234. Roberto Unger, The Left Alternative, London: Verso, 2005, pp. 1–11. Quoted in Paul Nugent, ‘States and Social Contracts in Africa’, New Left Review, 63 (2010), 35–68 (p. 40). Neil Lazarus, ‘The Global Dispensation Since 1945’, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 19–40 (p. 30). Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, London: Verso, 1995, p. 32. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York and London: Academic Press, 1974, p. 355. Samir Amin, ‘Democracy and National Strategy in the Periphery’, Third World Quarterly, 9:4 (1987), 1129–1156 (p. 1130).

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26. On Lumumba’s murder see also Sean Kelly’s America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire, Washington: The American University Press, 1993. William Blum discusses the central role played by the United States in fostering the violence and disorder that followed Congolese independence, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II , London: Zed Books, 2013, pp. 156–163. The CIA had a direct hand in the secession of Katanga province, in Lumumba’s initial removal from the premiership and in Mobutu’s military coup. The United States also provided military aid to the new regime in its war against insurgents in the Eastern part of the country. 27. Ludo de Witte, The Assassination of Lumumba, London: Verso, 1992. 28. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism: The Political Economy of Human Rights, vol. 1, London: Pluto Press, 2015 [1979], pp. 8–9. 29. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin, ‘Superintending Global Capital’, New Left Review, 35 (2005), 101–123 (p. 107). 30. Noam Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War: U.S. Foreign Policy from Vietnam to Reagan, New York: The New Press, 2003 [1982], p. 8. 31. Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence, London: Free Press, 2005, p. 152. 32. Basil Davidson, Can Africa Survive? Arguments Against Growth Without Development, London: Heinemann, 1975, p. 24. 33. Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London: Heinemann, 1989, p. 239. 34. Leo Zeilig and David Seddon, ‘Introduction: Resisting the Scramble for Africa’, Class Struggle and Resistance in Africa, ed. Zeilig, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, pp. 1–24 (p. 4). 35. On the way in which ‘mineral dependency’ generates unrepresentative and often authoritarian state structures and narrow ruling elites that rely on the rents from resource extraction, see Ray Bush, ‘Undermining Africa’, Historical Materialism, 12:4 (2004), 173–201. 36. Ian Taylor, ‘Dependency Redux: Why Africa Is Not Rising’, Review of African Political Economy, 43:147 (2016), 8–25 (p. 16). 37. Tom Burgis, The Looting Machine: Warlords, Tycoons, Smugglers, and the Systematic Looting of Africa’s Wealth, London: William Collins, 2015, p. 4. 38. Padraig Carmody, The New Scramble for Africa, Cambridge: Polity, 2011, pp. 121–122. 39. Prashad, The Darker Nations, p. 222. 40. Ibid., p. 231. 41. Bello, Dark Victory, p. 31. 42. Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2002, p. 14.

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43. Nicholas Van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, 1979–1999, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 7. 44. The definitive work on ‘structural adjustment’ in the African context is Nicolas Van de Walle, Nicole Ball and Vijaya Ramachandran (eds), Beyond Structural Adjustment: The Institutional Context of African Development, London: Palgrave, 2003. On the ‘conditionalities’ attached to SAPs, see Eric Toussaint and Damien Millet, Debt, the IMF and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010, pp. 106–124. 45. Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism, London: Allen Lane, 2010, p. 118. 46. Bello, Dark Victory, p. 5. 47. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 162. 48. Harrison, Neoliberal Africa, p. 40. 49. Léonce Ndikumana and James K. Boyce, Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent, London: Zed Books, 2011, p. 96. 50. Harrison, Neoliberal Africa, p. 88. 51. Mark Curtis, The Great Deception: Anglo-American Power and the World Order, London: Pluto, 1998, p. 103. 52. Fantu Cheru, ‘Debt, Adjustment and the Politics of Effective Response to HIV/AIDS in Africa’, Third World Quarterly, 23:2 (2002), 299–312. 53. Claude Ake, The Political Economy of Crisis and Underdevelopment in Africa: Selected Works, ed. Julius Inhonvbere, Lagos: JAD Publishers, 1989, p. 62. See also Stephen P. Riley and Trevor W. Parfitt, ‘Economic Adjustment and Democratization in Africa’, Free Markets and Food Riots: The Politics of Global Adjustment, ed. John Walton and David Seddon, Oxford: Blackwell, 1994, pp. 135–170. 54. Davis, Planet of Slums, pp. 161–162. 55. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents, p. 3. See also Richard Peet, Unholy Trinity: The IMF, World Bank and WTO, Second edition, London: Zed Books, 2009, pp. 99–104. 56. Neil Smith, ‘The Satanic Geographies of Globalization: Uneven Development in the 1990s’, Public Culture, 10:1 (1997), 169–189 (p. 179). 57. Van de Walle, African Economies and the Politics of Permanent Crisis, p. 16. 58. Ibid., pp. 275–276. 59. Prashad, The Darker Nations, p. 238. 60. William K. Tabb, Economic Governance in the Age of Globalization, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004, p. 193. See also Bill Cooke, ‘A New Continuity with Colonial Administration: Participation in Development Management’, Third World Quarterly, 24:1 (2003), 47–61.

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61. Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: The Guilty Secrets of Rich Nations and the Threat to Global Prosperity, London: Random House, 2007, p. 28. 62. James Ferguson, Africa in the Neoliberal World Order, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, pp. 69–88. 63. Pita Ogaba Agbese and George Klay Kieh, Jr., ‘State Renewal in Africa: The Lessons’, Reconstituting the State in Africa, ed. Agbese and Klay Kieh, London: Palgrave, 2007, pp. 279–294 (p. 286). 64. World Bank, World Development Report 2002: Building Institutions for Markets, quoted in Paul Cammack, ‘The Governance of Global Capitalism: A New Materialist Perspective’, Historical Materialism, 11:2 (2003), 37–59 (p. 48). 65. Paul Nugent, Africa Since Independence, London: Palgrave, 2004, p. 369. 66. Rita Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democracy: Development Discourse and Good Governance in Africa, London and New York: Zed Books, 2000, p. ix. 67. Thandika Mkandawire, ‘Crisis Management and the Making of “Choiceless Democracies” in Africa’, The State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa, ed. Richard Joseph, Boulder, CO: Lynne Reiner, 1998, pp. 119– 136. 68. Stefan Andreasson, ‘Economic Reforms and “Virtual Democracy” in South Africa and Zimbabwe: The Incompatibility of Liberalisation, Inclusion and Development’, Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 21:3 (2003), 383–406. 69. Abrahamsen, Disciplining Democracy, p. xiv. 70. Rita Abrahamsen, ‘African Democracy—Still Disciplined After All These Years?’ International Relations, 27:2 (2013), 241–246 (p. 242). 71. IMF staff, ‘IMF Lending to Poor Countries—How Does the PRGF Differ from the ESAF?’ April 2001, https://www.imf.org/external/np/ exr/ib/2001/043001.htm [accessed 21 September 2020]. 72. Chang, Bad Samaritans, p. 35. 73. Ibid., p. 36. 74. Arundhati Roy, The Chequebook and the Cruise Missile, London: Harper, 2004, p. 72. 75. Harrison, Neoliberal Africa, p. 55. 76. Abrahamsen, ‘African Democracy—Still Disciplined After All These Years?’ p. 244. 77. Walden Bello, Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy, London: Zed Books, 2004, p. 82. 78. See Stefano Liberti, Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism, trans. Enda Flannelly, London: Verso, 2013. 79. Rita Abrahamsen, ‘Review Essay: Poverty Reduction or Adjustment by Another Name?’ Review of African Political Economy, 31:99 (2004),

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80.

81. 82. 83.

84.

85.

86. 87.

88.

89. 90. 91. 92.

184–187 (p. 185). See also Alastair Fraser’s argument that PRSPs ‘imperil African sovereignty, self-determination and hopes for substantive democracy.’ ‘Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers: Now Who Calls the Shots?’, Review of African Political Economy, 104/5, 317–340 (p. 317). For a detailed critique of the paradigm of ‘poverty reduction’ and ‘good governance’ see David Craig and Doug Porter, Development Beyond Neoliberalism? Governance, Poverty Reduction and Political Economy, London: Routledge, 2006. Shalmali Guttal, ‘The End of Imagination: The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Poverty Reduction’, Focus on the Global South, http://focusweb.org/node/271 [accessed 17 April 2018]. Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising, p. 77. Saul, The Next Liberation Struggle, p. 22. For a definitive account of the ways in which dominant forms of development discourse actually compound imperialist relations of power, see David B. Moore, ‘Development Discourse as Hegemony: Towards an Ideological History—1945–1995’, Debating Development Discourse: Institutional and Popular Perspectives, ed. David B. Moore and Gerald J. Schmitz, London: Macmillan, 1995, pp. 1–53. Samir Amin, ‘The Millennium Development Goals: A Critique from the South’, Third World Quarterly, 57:10 (2006), http://monthlyreview. org/2006/03/01/the-millennium-development-goals-a-critique-fromthe-south [accessed 12 September 2018]. Paul Cammack, ‘Neoliberalism, the World Bank and the New Politics of Development’, Development Theory and Practice: Critical Perspectives, ed. Uma Kothari and Martin Minogue, London: Palgrave, 2002, pp. 157–178 (p. 160). See also the essays collected in Bill Cooke and Uma Kothari (eds), Participation: The New Tyranny? London: Zed Books, 2001. Quoted in Edward Osei Kwadwo Prempeh, ‘The Anticapitalist Movement and African Resistance to Neoliberal Globalization’, Neoliberalism and Globalization in Africa: Contestations from the Embattled Continent, ed. Joseph Mensah, London: Palgrave, 2008, pp. 55–69 (p. 64). Quoted in Edward Osei Kwadwo Prempeh, ‘The Anticapitalist Movement and African Resistance to Neoliberal Globalization’, Neoberalism and Globalization in Africa, ed. Mensah, pp. 55–69 (p. 65). Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, p. 276. Ibid., pp. 219–223. Ibid., p. 270. See Benedetto Fontana’s ‘The Concept of Caesarism in Gramsci’, Dictatorship in History and Theory: Bonapartism, Caesarism, and Totalitarianism, ed. Peter Baehr and Melvin Richter, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 175–195.

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93. Ahmad, Selected Works, p. 150. 94. Jean-François Bayart, The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, trans. Mary Harper, Christopher and Elizabeth Harrison, London: Longman, 1993, p. 181. 95. Ahmad, Selected Works, p. 140. 96. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1961], p. 122. Subsequent references are given in the main text after WoE. 97. Curtis, The Great Deception, p. 99. 98. Basil Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, London: James Currey, 1992, p. 194. 99. The Mozambican example is an instructive one. Inherited economic underdevelopment, total dependence on foreign capital and markets, the weaknesses of a liberation movement obliged to organise along hierarchical and military lines, encirclement by imperialist powers such as the United States and its apartheid allies in Southern Africa all played a part, as John Saul’s compelling analysis shows, in the ultimate failure of Mozambique’s plans for political and economic development. To Frelimo’s development strategy, powerful external forces had responded with what Saul calls a concerted ‘counterdevelopment strategy designed to do as much as possible to neutralize Mozambique as a progressive actor in the region.’ John S. Saul, ‘Development and Counterdevelopment Strategies in Mozambique’, Afro-Marxist Regimes: Ideology and Public Policy, ed. Edmond J. Keller and Donald Rothchild, Boulder and London: Lynne Rienner, 1987, pp. 109–153 (p. 138). 100. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, pp. 22–23. 101. Ibid., p. 28. 102. Ibid., p. 29. 103. Patrick Bond’s excellent Looting Africa: The Economics of Exploitation (London: Zed Books, 2006) is one study that places the rule of these rapacious elites in the context of Africa’s exploitative subordination to the global North. 104. John S. Saul, Liberation Lite: The Roots of Recolonization in Southern Africa, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011, p. 28. 105. Tamara Sivanandan, ‘Anticolonialism, National Liberation, and Postcolonial Nation Formation’, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, ed. Neil Lazarus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 41–65 (p. 58). 106. Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twentieth Century, London: Verso, 2007, p. 217. Subsequent references are given in the main text after ASB.

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107. Peter Gowan, The Global Gamble: Washington’s Faustian Bid for World Dominance, London: Verso, 1999. 108. On the increasing ‘financialisation’of the world economy during this period, see John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009; and Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All, London: Verso, 2013. 109. Yanis Varoufakis has dubbed this peculiar system ‘the global minotaur’: ‘the defining characteristic of the post-1971 era was a reversal of the flow of trade and capital surpluses between the United States and the rest of the world. The hegemon, for the first time in world history, strengthened its hegemony by wilfully enlarging its deficits.’ Just as the Cretan minotaur of Greek mythology fed each year on the seven young men and seven young women sent to his labyrinth as foreign tribute by the Athenians so the similarly voracious American minotaur has feasted on ‘a constant flow of tribute from the periphery to the imperial centre.’ The Global Minotaur: America, Europe and the Future of the Global Economy, London: Zed Books, 2015, p. xiv and p. 23. 110. Giovanni Arrighi, ‘The African Crisis’, New Left Review, 15 (2002), 5– 36 (p. 27), emphasis in the original. 111. Fredric Jameson, Valences of the Dialectic, London: Verso, 2009, p. 582. 112. Arrighi, ‘The African Crisis’, p. 31. South Korea, for example, managed to escape the fate of being a mere agricultural and raw material producer. As Ha-Joon Chang reminds us, South Korea benefitted in the period of its industrial take-off in the 1960s not only from American aid but from government subsidies, tariff protections, state-ownership in strategic industries and total state control over foreign exchange. Chang, Bad Samaritans, p. 14. Insofar as radical governments in Latin America have been able to reverse (or at least hold back) the tide of persistent underdevelopment in recent years, they too have done so with the aid of state intervention. The same goes for China of course. 113. See Tom Reifer, ‘Capital’s Carographer’, New Left Review, 60 (2009), 119–130. 114. See for example Giovanni Arrighi, ‘The Political Economy of Rhodesia’, New Left Review, 39 (1966), 35–65. 115. Giovanni Arrighi, Nicole Aschoff and Ben Scully, ‘Accumulation by Dispossession and Its Limits: The Southern African Paradigm Revisited’, Studies in Comparative International Development, 45 (2010), 410–438 (p. 417). 116. Giovanni Arrighi and John S. Saul, Essays on the Political Economy of Africa, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1973.

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117. Giovanni Arrighi, ‘International Corporations, Labor Aristocracies, and Economic Development in Tropical Africa’, Imperialism and Underdevelopment: A Reader, ed. Robert I. Rhodes, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1970, pp. 220–267 (p. 251). 118. William G. Martin, ‘Africa and World-Systems Analysis: A PostNationalist Project?’, Writing African History, ed. John Edward Philips, University of Rochester Press, 2005, pp. 381–402 (p. 381). One of Wallerstein’s first books was a study of the ‘road to independence’ in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire and of the considerable obstacles to economic development in those countries. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Road to Independence: Ghana and the Ivory Coast, Paris: Mouton & Co, 1964. Perhaps the most astute and prescient of his early discussions of postcolonial Africa is Wallerstein’s Africa: The Politics of Unity, in which he foresaw a profound crisis for ‘radical-nationalist’ states: ‘No longer protected by U.S.-Soviet competition for their favor, they are now more fully exposed to pressures arising in the world economy of which they are an appendage.’ Immanuel Wallerstein, Africa: The Politics of Unity: An Analysis of a Contemporary Social Movement, London: Pall Mall Press, 1968, p. 249. 119. Martin, ‘Africa and World-Systems Analysis’, p. 384. 120. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power, The U.S. in a Chaotic World, New York: The New Press, 2003, p. 111. 121. Fredric Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 60s’, Ideologies of Theory—Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 2: The Syntax of History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988, pp. 178–208 (p. 208). 122. Wolfgang Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crises of Democratic Capitalism, London: Verso, 2014. 123. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, p. 16. 124. Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 1960s’, p. 184. 125. Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Global Possibilities, 1990–2025’, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein (eds), The Age of Transition: Trajectory of the World-System, 1945–2025, London: Zed Books, 1996, pp. 226-43 (p. 236). 126. Susan Andrade, ‘Realism, Reception, 1968, and West Africa’, Modern Language Quarterly, 73:3, 289–308 (p. 292). 127. Andrade, ‘Realism, Reception, 1968, and West Africa’, p. 308. 128. See also Michael Hudson, Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order, 2nd revised edition, London: Pluto, 2005. 129. Jukius K. Nyerere, ‘Unity for a New Order’, The Black Scholar, May– June 1980, 55–63 (p. 60). See Jagdish N. Bhagwati (ed), The New International Economic Order: The North-South Debate, London: The MIT Press, 1977, pp. 1–24; Nils Gilman, ‘The New International Economic Order: A Reintroduction’, Humanity, 19 March 2015, 1–16;

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130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

and ‘Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order: Resolution adopted by the General Assembly’, 1 May 1974, http://www.un-documents.net/s6r3201.htm [accessed 2 July 2018]. Nyerere, ‘Unity for a New Order’, p. 61. Bello, Deglobalization, p. 35. Quoted in Prashad, The Darker Nations, p. 43. Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South, London: Verso, 2014, p. 134. Jameson, ‘Periodizing the 1960s’, p. 207, emphasis in the original.

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Harrison, Graham. 2010. Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering. London: Zed Books. Harvey, David. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford UP. Hudson, Michael. 2005. Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order, Second edition. London: Pluto Press. IMF staff. 2001. “IMF Lending to Poor Countries—How Does the PRGF Differ from the ESAF?” April 2001. https://www.imf.org/external/np/exr/ ib/2001/043001.htm [accessed 21 September 2020]. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. “Periodizing the 60s.” Ideologies of Theory—Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, pp. 178–208. ———. 2009. Valences of the Dialectic. London: Verso. Kelly, Sean. 1993. America’s Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire. Washington: The American UP. Lapavitsas, Costas. 2013. Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. London: Verso. Lazarus, Neil. 2004. “The Global Dispensation Since 1945.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Ed. Neil Lazarus. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 19–40. Legum, Colin. 1999. Africa Since Independence. Indianapolis: Indiana UP. Liberti, Stefano. 2013. Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism. Trans. Enda Flannelly. London: Verso. Martin, William G. 2005. “Africa and World-Systems Analysis: A Post-Nationalist Project?” Writing African History. Ed. John Edward Philips. U of Rochester P, pp. 381–402. Meredith, Martin. 2005. The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. London: Free Press. Mkandawire, Thandika. 1998. “Crisis Management and the Making of “Choiceless Democracies” in Africa.” The State, Conflict, and Democracy in Africa. Ed. Richard Joseph. Boulder, Co: Lynne Reiner, pp. 119–36. Moore, David B. 1995. “Development Discourse as Hegemony: Towards an Ideological History—1945–1995.” Debating Development Discourse: Institutional and Popular Perspectives. Ed. David B. Moore and Gerald J. Schmitz. London: Macmillan, pp. 1–53. Ndikumana, Léonce and James K. Boyce. 2011. Africa’s Odious Debts: How Foreign Loans and Capital Flight Bled a Continent. London: Zed Books. Neumann, Franz. 1957. “Notes on the Theory of Dictatorship.” The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory. Ed. Herbert Marcuse. Glencoe, Il: The Free Press, pp. 233–56. Nugent, Paul. 2004. Africa Since Independence. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2010. “States and Social Contracts in Africa.” New Left Review 63, 35–68.

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CHAPTER 3

Performance and Power I: Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow

The next two chapters place the Kenyan Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow (2006) and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote (En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages ) by Ahmadou Kourouma of Côte d’Ivoire (1998) in what has usually been seen as a predominantly Latin American tradition of dictator novels.1 The reason for the popularity of the theme of dictatorship is surely self-evident. The ‘Boom’ writers in Latin America wrote about dictators because they lived under them or had fled them. Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch was written in Franco’s Spain for instance, though the Colombian need not have travelled so far in order to experience what it was like to live under a despot’s heel. Augusto Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme (1974), which is an elaborate evocation of the rule of José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the austere tyrant who reigned over Paraguay after independence, was written and published during the similarly protracted and brutal US-backed dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner. Many African dictator novels resemble their Latin American predecessors, to which they are noticeably indebted, above all in their preoccupation with aesthetic questions of language, form and reception. As Josaphat Kubayanda says in what was the first (alas abortive) effort to put together a comprehensive study of African dictator novels, the word is one of the most powerful tools pressed into service by dictatorships2 ; the task that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2_3

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these novels set themselves is to contest the dictator’s ownership of it. Just as the dictatorship is challenged by a democratic hubbub of voices at the level of the novels’ content, so their form frequently gives way to multi-voicedness. Ng˜ ug˜ı’s and Kourouma’s novels, to use one of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s phrases, try ‘to restore voices to the land’.3 One might even say, with due deference to the title of the Malian novelist Doumbi-Fakoly’s La Retraite anticipée du Guide Suprème (1984), that these novels frequently prefigure, expect and potentially help to facilitate the dictator’s retreat or fall. I will acclaim the capacity of these two African dictator novels, by virtue of their form, to articulate the origins of dictatorial power in postcolonial Africa in addition to anticipating the nature and shape of the democratic alternatives to dictatorial power. The dictator novel commonly stretches, modifies and even leaves behind the conventional forms of novelistic realism. Emmanuel Yewah’s analysis of speechmaking in dictator novels by Doumbi-Fakoli and Congo-Brazzaville’s Tchicaya U Tam’Si shows how the dictator’s oratory is presented ironically in these works so that the novels’ implied audience outside the text can assess its deficiencies.4 Similarly, the advantage of Roberto González Echeverría’s pioneering approach to Latin American dictator novels is that it recognises the way in which the novels themselves possess something of those orators’ ironic self-subversion, a fact which worries Yewah but which Echeverría values and seeks to explain. Echeverría’s ingenious analysis of Latin American dictator novels in his The Voice of the Masters therefore focuses less on the blood-spattered content of these works than on their distinctive forms.5 He is concerned with their ability to mimic or occupy the authority of the dictator and, by deconstructing that authority, which means to advertise its unreliability, eccentricity and susceptibility to the interruptions and rejoinders of other voices, to debunk it and deprive it of its power to compel us. What is revealed by these works is, importantly, the intrinsic fallibility of power or, put differently, the way in which the purported omnipotence of the dictator is in practice undermined by his power’s reliance on the deceitful and ambiguous medium of writing. What Wayne Booth has memorably called the ‘rhetoric of fiction’6 is employed in these works to explore (and also to subvert) the rhetoric of dictatorship. In Echeverría’s terms, dictator novels discredit the rhetoric of dictatorship by unmasking the dictatorship of rhetoric. In these books, as Marjorie Agosin too has observed, ‘the writing itself is demystified’.7

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I want to extend and refine Echeverría’s analysis in the African context by emphasising the African texts’ performative quality, performance being both the subject of a great deal of recent scholarship in cultural theory and a long-lasting interest of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s. Of course performance is not just something that takes place on the stage or in the concert hall. My contention is that these novels perform political power in the sense of staging that power’s operations, dramatising its precariousness and exposing it to censure and disavowal. I wish to emphasise these two texts’ potential not only, by representing the fallibility of the dictator’s voice and by enumerating the numerous agents and forces that brought about and sustain his rule, to provide a critique of dictatorship, but also to formulate a normatively democratic riposte to dictatorship. The techniques of fiction here become a form of political theory and even political prophecy; the intrinsically dialogic or polyphonic nature of novelistic form serves both to oppose dictatorship and to foretell alternative political arrangements and institutions. Some knowledge of the system of interests that brought the dictator to power in the first place as well as of the democratic and popular forces that could and should replace him are potential consequences of reading dictator novels. Wizard of the Crow and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote are dictator novels rather than novels about dictatorship because they perform dictatorial power and they do so, moreover, in such a way as to allow readers both to interpret the origins of the crime of dictatorship in a durable world-system of imperialist power and to appreciate dictatorship’s vulnerability to genuinely democratic forms of government. Of course, all dictators are performers. When their positions weakened Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea and Omar Bongo of Gabon both sought to present themselves as devout Muslims. Jomo Kenyatta and Malawi’s Hastings Banda carried flywhisks as marks of authenticity and authority, while Mobutu hoped his leopardskin toque would evoke associations with the power of big cats. Such props are among the affectations of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s fictional Ruler. The Ruler, as he is invariably called, recalls Daniel Arap Moi while his fiefdom, Abur˜ıria, resembles Kenya. But he is in fact, like Kourouma’s Koyaga, who is the ‘Supreme Guide’ of the République du Golfe, a composite of Africa’s many tyrants.8 Power is in part a performance, something to which these works draw attention and which they therefore set against the illusion of power’s fixity and omnipotence; if power is a performance then it can be reperformed, even mocked and contested. One of the protagonists in Farah’s Close Sesame (1983), the last

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novel in his great Variations on a Theme of African Dictatorship trilogy, denounces Somalia under the police state of Siad Barre as ‘a stage where the Grandest Actor performs in front of an applauding audience that ug˜ı and Kourouma, is drawing should be booing him’.9 Farah, like Ng˜ our attention to the theatrical aspect of power and, conversely, to the power of the novel’s theatrical performance to encourage audiences to jeer and pelt the dictator and even to chase him from the arena. In his critical writing, as we shall see, Ng˜ ug˜ı has explored and extolled what he sees as the performative quality of all artistic practice. I think he means by this something like the capacity of a musical score or the script of a play or even the text of a novel to stage its own contingency and adaptability. Such works call attention to the variety of ways in which works of art, through sound, language and visual imagery, can explore and represent and perhaps even help to construct the world or worlds with which they deal. A performative work of art, and for Ng˜ ug˜ı all works of art to varying degrees are performative since their explicit performativity is what distinguishes them from other forms of expression and communication, also enlists the involvement of its various audiences. They too are called upon to recognise and participate in the process by which established ways of seeing and interpreting the world are starkly foregrounded, reperformed and de-familiarised. Therefore by referring to the performative quality of the dictator novel, of which Ng˜ ug˜ı’s and Kourouma’s novels are my main examples, I am also pointing to the possibility that they possess a kind of instructive or even pedagogical function since in fact they reperform conventional ways of seeing dictatorship in postcolonial Africa. As I endeavoured to show in the previous chapters, dictatorship is not a uniquely African malediction. Dictatorship is not explicable without reference to the legacies and the current realities of colonial and neocolonial power and in particular to the continuation and even intensification of that power during the prolonged crisis that has befallen the world economy since the 1970s. Nor is dictatorship somehow inevitable or ineluctable. These performances of dictatorship alert us to the African state’s indebtedness, so to speak, to an ongoing and veritably global history of autocratic power precisely so that African dictatorship can stand revealed as a historical and a political problem not one that is peculiar or intrinsic to the continent. In short, dictatorships have been put in place and can be removed. The novels’ own contingency can therefore allude to the similarly (though secretly) contingent, contestable and ultimately alterable power of the state. But

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dictatorship has not yet come to an end. Indeed it is precisely the durability of dictatorship that both novels wish to stress. The postcolonial state performs power, in addition to exerting power in the raw through violence and other forms of coercion. It is the purpose of the dictator novel to exhibit that ‘performativity’ and thus to remind readers that power can and must be performed differently.

Art at War with the State Dictator novels contest the strident, monologic voice of the dictator. They ‘bandy words with a government loudspeaker’, as Wole Soyinka puts it in Kongi’s Harvest, a rare dictator play.10 Frequently modernistic and manyvoiced, dictator novels disrupt the myth of the dictator’s omnipotence by portraying the various factors that aid the dictator’s rise and sustain him in power in addition to the diverse forces of opposition that oppose his rule and seek to supplant it. What the African dictator novel does, at the level of its form, is mimic and therefore dramatise the imposition of dictatorial power, as well as, crucially, making clear the fallibility of that power and the possibility of resistance to it. A further aspect of their utility is dictator novels’ capacity, via this discrediting of the voice of the dictator, to reveal a multiplicity of voices sounding within the dictator’s browbeaten state. These voices include the various domestic and foreign interests that led to the dictator’s ascendancy in the first place, in addition to the voices of opposition. Many of these novels amplify the voices not just of the crowds who invade the despot’s palace, of the disgruntled army officers who plot his assassination and the muffled cries of his victims, but also of his flunkeys’ obsequious songs of praise, of the duplicitous homilies of his first-world sponsors, as well as the patronising lectures and continuing meddlesomeness of the departing colonialists. I am claiming that the polyphonic nature of these texts is a consequence of their aversion to and avoidance of an unquestioned and all-powerful authorial or narratorial presence; furthermore, that this polyphony has two crucial effects: one explanatory, the other normative. The dictator’s is not the only voice heard in these texts, which strive to discredit his dreams of omnipotence as well as our assumptions about the naturalness and permanence of authoritarian power; there are also the voice of the wider system of powerful interests of which he is the figurehead as well as those of the citizens and movements that wish to induce a democratic transformation in the political and economic affairs of the postcolonial state.

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A key theorist here is Mikhail Bakhtin of course, for whom the novel is a polyphonic and even incipiently democratic form since it dramatises the encounters of diverse voices and in so doing hints at the possibility of their democratic interaction. I do not propose to discuss Bakhtin’s work at length, let alone offer a ‘Bakhtinian’ analysis of these novels. It is nevertheless useful to recall how Bakhtin defines polyphony as an aesthetic arrangement of different voices whose interaction is more or less unhindered by the interference of some omniscient and putatively authoritative point of view. Polyphony is a formal property of the text, Bakhtin stresses, not a characteristic of freely conversing characters; far from being at the discretion of the author polyphony is in fact an intrinsic property of literary discourse. For the voices in novels present themselves not as ‘real’ or ‘true’ in any dogmatic or literal sense but invariably as provisional, multiple, even ironic and debatable. Because, in Dostoevsky for example, ‘[n]ot a single element of the work is structured from the point of a view of a nonparticipating “third person”’,11 both author and narrator have the function not of exercising authority but of exhibiting authority’s precariousness and of teaching veritably political lessons about authority’s diffusion. Bakhtin’s is ‘an aesthetic for democracy’, in Ken Hirschkop’s congenial phrase.12 Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him and even of rebelling against him.13

The same is true of the dictator novel. ‘To write is to disconnect the power of words from oneself’, as the dictator tells his amanuensis disapprovingly in Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme. ‘To so charge that power of the word that it gradually detaches itself from oneself with everything that is one’s very own and becomes that of another’.14 African dictator novels are valuable because of this same capacity to perform power, power’s volubility and conceit, as well as its weakness and its vulnerability to other voices and aspirations. Importantly, the dictator is not just someone who dictates in the sense of issuing orders but someone who dictates in the sense of issuing commands that must subsequently be written down in the form of laws, narratives, instructions and so on. Crucially and fascinatingly, the dictator’s power is therefore dependent on the decidedly shifty and ambiguous, not to mention unreliable, medium of language and especially writing.

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The consequences of that dependence are brought home to us by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapu´scinski’s ´ remarkable account in The Emperor of the Abyssinian monarch Haile Selassie’s ailing absolutism.15 The Emperor employed a Minister of the Pen, Kapu´scinski ´ tells us, whose job it was to take down his unclear and ambiguous instructions, orders spoken so quietly that the minister could scarcely hear them. ‘The minister transcribed his ruler’s scant and foggy mutterings. All the rest was interpretation, and that was a matter for the minister, who passed down the decision in writing’.16 These acts of dictation, which produced ambiguous orders and therefore placed great power in the hands of the Minister of the Pen, allowed the Emperor to avoid responsibility for mistaken courses of action by placing the blame on the Minister’s deficient powers of interpretation. However, in addition to bolstering the Emperor’s power they also, paradoxically, expose his power’s reliance on (and therefore its vulnerability to) the intrinsically ambiguous medium of writing. Once the orders are written down, in other words, they can be interpreted in new ways, contradicted and even disobeyed. The dictator’s dependence on writing reveals his dependence on his subordinates, on their willingness not to realise or act upon their power over the interpretation and execution of his orders. Dictation in both its political and linguistic senses is in fact the principal theme of Roa Bastos’s I the Supreme. It is above all its use of the mutinous and ambiguous nature of writing to bring home the surreptitious vulnerability of dictatorial power that distinguishes this great novel. Writing, the means by which the despot disseminates his orders and exercises his power, is simultaneously the thing that limits that power and undermines it. Francia’s professions of omnipotence are repeatedly refuted by language’s indefiniteness, its consequent susceptibility to subversive interpretations and its capacity to express the views and aspirations of different speakers. The novel begins with a handwritten note nailed to the door of the cathedral in Asunción. This message is not, as it professes to be, a letter in the hand of the dictator decreeing that his body should be decapitated after his death but a pasquinade, a sort of anonymous lampoon. Established straight away, therefore, is the novel’s most prominent theme: the politically subversive dimension of writing. Policarpo Patiño, the dictator’s ‘ragtag amanuensis’ (IS, 29), is ordered to track down the perpetrators of the pasquinade but what the novel subsequently dramatises is the inevitable failure of this attempted reassertion of monologic power and the resultant fallibility and vulnerability of the dictator’s

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authority. I the Supreme is a highly complex and challenging book. Its footnotes lend an air of historical veracity but ultimately serve to blur the line between fact and fiction and therefore to emphasise the untrustworthiness of official truth, an effect enhanced by the remarkable diversity and intermingling of genres such as historical documents, private notebooks and the dictator’s own fulminations. There are repeated reminders of the incompleteness and unreliability of the text and, by implication, of all linguistic utterances. A confusing array of different speakers disrupts and contradicts Francia’s narrative of events, evidencing its uncertainty and contradictoriness. His constant worry that subordinates are altering or misunderstanding his instructions and the insistent presence of Policarpo and the book’s anonymous compiler serve to stress the mediations, digressions and distortions undergone by power when, inevitably, power comes into contact with language. ‘When I dictate to you’, Francia complains to Policarpo, ‘the words have a meaning; when you write them, another’ (IS, 57). The dictator novel, in its Latin American and African variants, is therefore distinguished by its recognition that language, in the form of rhetoric, is employed as an instrument of power. The task it sets itself is to reveal this fact and to refashion language into a form of democratic dialogue. Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch, to cite another classic Latin American example, with its interminable sentences, its sheer faces of unparagraphed prose, its confusing array of unidentified individual and collective speakers (the plural pronoun ‘we’ both beginning and ending the novel), succeeds in refashioning language from a medium of control and intentionality into a chaotic and incipiently democratic hubbub of voices. With its confusing cacophony of often unidentified speakers and the outrageous liberties that it takes with history and chronology, The Autumn of the Patriarch is a protracted meditation on the democratic permissiveness of language and on language’s resistance to monopolisation by the singular intentions of individual speakers. Individual and collective voices jostle the patriarch’s fanatical but ultimately unavailing attempt to deploy language as a medium of power. Furthermore, the novel’s confusion of viewpoints has the effect of inducing distrust in his partial and megalomaniacal account. Language is shown to be public property rather than a private fiefdom at the disposal of the powerful. The diminution of power is then both a theme and a formal effect. The Caribbean patriarch watches ‘over our destiny so that it would not be altered by the disorder of poetry’,17 but his interminable reign comes to

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an end with a popular revolution in the same way that his domination of language is usurped by literature’s ebullient or disorderly portrayal of different voices. The tyrant who professes to rule over language is a paper tiger; the jubilant crowds and the collective narrative voice that commence and conclude the book find upon storming the presidential palace nothing but the rotting vestiges of his authority. The patriarch occupies a ‘throne of illusions’.18 The forcefulness of Márquez’s anarchic prose is to be found, paradoxically, in its eschewal of force: it escapes the control of the dictator and cascades down the sheer sides of the text, evincing, in Adorno’s words about the poet Joseph von Eichendorff, ‘the power not to resist the descending flow of language rather than the power to control it’.19 Dictator novels perform power then, which involves displaying power’s precariousness and contingency. To read them is therefore to expose power, see through it and subject it to alternatives. Such novels are performances, therefore, insofar as they are orientated towards an audience from whom they seek to elicit the interpretative intelligence necessary to perceive the fallibility of the dictator’s voice. These are self-consciously ‘worldly’ texts, to use Edward Said’s useful term, by which, like Said, I mean that they welcome and even encourage their own susceptibility to the various interpretative interventions of their recipients.20 ‘Performative’ is the key term in my argument, therefore, though not so much in the sense used in, say, J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, where it is used to describe utterances that are not ‘truth-evaluable’, or even in the sense pioneered by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, where it denotes the assemblage of discourses and social practices by which gender identities are regulated.21 Rather performance, as Said argues in his studies of musical performance, names the unpredictable and ultimately uncontrollable process by which art achieves its situatedness within the world. I hope it won’t seem like a digression if I look briefly at Said’s writings on Western classical music.22 I do so not just because they have been more or less totally ignored by postcolonial studies (the discipline he effectively founded and helped to shape), despite constituting some of the most vivid and instructive examples of Said’s ideas about how practices of power and of resistance to power are enacted at the microlevel of aesthetic form and reception. What is even more important for our purposes is the possibility that by looking more closely at these neglected studies we might succeed in clarifying the way in which these

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two novels use the provocative and reinterpretable quality of performance to subvert the idea of dictatorship, employing in other words the power of performance to undermine the performance of power. Performance is where the text of a novel is perused and interpreted by its readers, where a play is staged, or, which is primarily what interests Said, where a musical composition is rescued from its muteness, interpreted, creatively re-enacted, and therefore, as he puts it, elaborated by conductors, musicians and audiences. Without performance there is no music, nor any literature for that matter. One of the things that make Said’s observation so enabling instead of just a truism about aesthetic experience is that it reminds us of the complex, rarefied and even transformational space of art’s public setting. Classical music, as Said shows, is usually encountered in the heavily ritualised form of the concert or recital, which is governed by certain conventions that regulate and sometimes constrain the interpretative freedoms of both performers and audiences. These conventions include the concert hall’s often stuffy protocols, its prohibitive rules and conditions of entry, in addition to the generally conservative pressures exerted by critics, corporate sponsors and many audiences to schedule a familiar and unadventurously executed repertory. But Said is also at pains to stress what he calls the potential urgency and extremity of the occasion of musical performance, by which he means the rapt attention that this singular event compels, the creative freedom it affords the performers, its tautness and fixed temporal duration (musical performance’s inimitableness and ephemerality, which is to say its finite duration and never-to-be-repeated specificity in time), as well as its vagaries and permissiveness, not to mention its potential to flout expectations, transgress boundaries and provoke thought. The value of the piano recital, for example, something to which Said returns again and again in his essays on music, is not to be found in the pianist’s facility for dazzling his audience or for preserving the repertory and safeguarding its authority but rather in his or her willingness (and ability) to construe that authority as having something to do with music’s potential for transgression and provocation, with the elaboration and opening out of the music’s meanings and possibilities so that they can then be further refined and enlarged by listeners. Said probes the techniques of exceptional pianists like Alfred Brendel, Wilhelm Kempff and Maurizio Pollini, and resumes his lasting obsession with the prodigious virtuosity of the eccentric Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Time and again Said acclaims Gould’s disarming flair for selfprojection, his penchant for flouting the expectations of his listeners, and

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his ability, by virtue of his associative mind and amazing digital skill, to rejuvenate familiar works. Meanwhile Pollini’s great virtue, according to Said, is that his career communicates a sense of growth and purpose as well as a coherent vision. For him, playing the piano is not a service occupation or a matter of executing a score faithfully and reverentially but of translating, interpreting and exploring the repertory as well as permitting his audiences to hear the music in intriguing new ways. Performers, like critics and texts, according to Said, ‘ought to alienate and distance the public’,23 to compel concentration and analysis, enhance awareness and sharpen perception. Said proves himself a true disciple of the Frankfurt School in his abhorrence of the market’s deadening effect on critical sensibility and artistic originality, and of the hackneyed, backwardlooking repertories demanded by consumers and corporate sponsors for whom music ought to conform to some deadening standard of familiarity or authenticity. Theodor Adorno, like Said, took issue with a ‘praxis of performance’ besotted with reactionary notions of authenticity that assume the significance of a piece is somehow fixed. But of course the creative adaptations and explorations of performers and audiences, in short, interpretation, is totally essential to what music is: ‘an interpretation which does not bother about the music’s meaning on the assumption that it will reveal itself of its own accord will inevitably be false since it fails to see that the meaning is always constituting itself anew’.24 When pianists traffic between composer and listener ‘in ways that involve us listeners in the experience and process of performing, they invite us into a utopian realm of acute awareness that is otherwise inaccessible to us’.25 Hence Said’s praise for intelligent and challenging interpretations of the classics, for arresting new works and for those rare performers who offend consciously against the protocols of the concert hall. For Said and also, as we shall see, for Ng˜ ug˜ı, performances that are self-consciously inventive and that provoke the audience and therefore encourage interpretation and participation are ways of defying those forces that seek to regulate and limit the space of performance and to restrict performance to mere replication. What exceptional players succeed in doing is close to what the novelists that I am discussing achieve, which is to foreground the performative element in art and hence its susceptibility to elaboration: ‘Thus the performer makes a statement about the unending process of interpretation itself, which is what all performance is finally about’.26

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Language is no more the fixed and unchanging property of the person who uses it than a score is the incontrovertible possession of its composer. It is not true to say that artworks are vulnerable to interpretation and imaginative adaptation therefore, for interpretation and adaptation are in fact constitutive of what they are. The artist’s task, according to Said, is ‘to draw the audience in by provocation, the dislocation of expectation, and the creation of new kinds of thinking’.27 Art deviates from ‘the ordinary, regular, or normative processes of everyday life’28 and compels their re-examination by demonstrating, through performance, its own provisionality and its reinterpretable quality. It therefore encourages the kind of experimentation, reconsideration and creative innovation that are usually discouraged outside the secluded but also privileged space of aesthetic experience. By encouraging these things, performers manage to ‘force the boundaries of the performance occasion’29 and connect aesthetic performance to political transgression. Ng˜ ug˜ı understands performance in a very similar way. Like Said, he is fascinated by what he calls ‘the politics of performance space’ (PGD, xi). For him, a performance is any representative action ‘that assumes an audience during its actualization’ (PGD, 5); performances therefore exhibit their own provisional nature and encourage the interpretations, applications and criticisms of their recipients. The oral performance of a narrative, literary characters’ presentation and reinvention of their own being (as Ng˜ ug˜ı puts it), literature’s manifestly fictive and incomplete quality, its propensity for provocations and ambiguities rather than certainties, its many-voicedness; all these things add up to a pedagogical stress on the possibility of movement, change and renewal. The political aspect of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work is not secondary or optional therefore, but, as he argues, a matter of accentuating something intrinsic to art itself, which uses its own performative nature to contrast the reality and possibility of change with reigning political interests’ stress on the permanence of the status quo: ‘There is no state that can be in permanent revolution. Art, on the other hand, is revolutionary by its very nature as art’ (PGD, 13). Its preoccupation with the enduring power of the postcolonial state is in fact very consistent in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work, which is why I find it puzzling that no less an authority than Simon Gikandi has accused Ng˜ ug˜ı’s earlier political and theoretical work of a ‘disinterest [sic] in the problematic of ug˜ı’s essay on the state’.30 There is no lack of interest in the state in Ng˜ ‘The Writer in a Neo-colonial State’ from 1985, where ‘the state’ is understood in the dual sense of the nation state, the independence of which is

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circumscribed by neocolonial structures of power, and the more directly political sense of institutions and organisations ‘emptied of any democratic life’.31 Indeed 1967’s A Grain of Wheat, the story of a Gikuyu village in the week leading up to independence in 1963, with its complex interweaving of different narratives, chronologies and viewpoints as Kenya’s new citizens recollect and reflect on the traumas and transformations of the Emergency, ‘villagisation’ and armed revolt, was already an attempt to stage at the interconnected levels of content and form a sense both of the disputable ownership and the as yet undecided future of the state, in ug˜ı’s work, A Grain of Wheat also both Ng˜ ug˜ı’s senses.32 As ever in Ng˜ illustrates different models of education and political leadership in order to reflect at the level of content on the questions of authority and power that are being dramatised at the less overt level of its distinctly polyphonic form. Art is invariably ‘at war with’ the state, as it has been throughout Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work. It is in this sense that Ng˜ ug˜ı’s assertion that ‘[t]he goal of human society is the reign of art on earth’ (PGD, 6) should be understood: as a characteristically utopian anticipation of a society in which individual identities and social relationships are as fluid and unregimented as works of literature present them as being. The conflict between art and the state would therefore be described more accurately as a conflict over the space and possibility of performance (PGD, 38). What unnerved the Kenyan authorities about Ng˜ ug˜ı’s involvement in community theatre in the late 1970s was his works’ capacity to engage the public, to galvanise them into discussion and reflection, and therefore to threaten the power ug˜ı says, the nation is structures of the postcolonial regime.33 If, as Ng˜ a giant performance space (PGD, 53–4), then one role available to the committed artist is that of the player who acts out the nation in such a way as to remind his audience of the nation’s contingency and impermanence. In this way Wizard of the Crow seeks, in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s terms, to ‘enact’ power and ‘to reflect, refract, and re-evaluate reality’ (PGD, 31). The postcolonial state, as I have said and as Ng˜ ug˜ı avers, performs power (besides inflicting power through violence); all the nation’s a stage and the men and women merely players. It is the purpose of the dictator novel to exhibit that ‘performativity’ and thus to remind readers that power could be performed differently.

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Performing the State in the Era of Structural Adjustment What distinguishes Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work is precisely its enthusiastic susceptibility to interpretation and adaptation. It is in readers’ performances of his novels, by which I mean not just our reading of them but our conscious realisation that they require reflection, elaboration and participation, that the novels become operative works of literature rather than just inert and taciturn manuscripts. Performance ‘neutralizes the worldlessness, the silent, seemingly uncircumstanced existence of a solitary text’,34 as Said has put it. What can be observed in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s career as a novelist and intellectual is a conscious augmentation of the realist concerns of his early fiction by a consistent preoccupation with these questions of language and power that I have been discussing. This is also a turn towards performance: that is, towards an orientation of his work in the direction of its own audience, whether in novels written in G˜ık˜ uy˜ u rather than English and designed to be read aloud in social gatherings, in ‘open’ theatrical productions that incurred the Kenyan authorities’ wrath by educating and engaging the public (such as the production of The Trial of Dedan K˜ımathi in Nairobi in 1976 and Mother Sing for Me in 1982), or in innovative fictional devices whose formal effects are as much a part of his books’ democratic politics as their revolutionary narratives. Oral literary practices are crucial here, as Ng˜ ug˜ı points out (PGD, 124). The G˜ık˜ uy˜ u-language novel Devil on the Cross is presented by a G˜ıcaand˜ı performer, whose art derives from the clever riddles narrated in poetry competitions in precolonial G˜ık˜ uy˜ u society.35 With their motifs and refrains, theatrical scenes that lend themselves to dramatisation, and characters’ exaggerated performance of their own identities and roles, these novels are riddles without prescribed answers presented for the participation and edification of audiences. ‘In the case of [Devil on the Cross ]’, which Ng˜ ug˜ı tells us is inspired by these techniques, ‘the narrator is challenging his assumed listeners to find the necessary answers to the many riddles that confront him when looking at the absurdities of postcolonial Kenyan society’ (PGD, 124). I do not think it a coincidence that the more politically committed Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work has become the more ‘literary’ it has grown to be. As Lewis Nkosi has argued, the ‘turn’ in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s fiction, his ongoing ‘quest for relevance’, is marked not just by his well-known decision to write in G˜ık˜ uy˜ u as well as English but also, just as importantly, by his adoption of ‘magic realist’ forms in an attempt to

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address his work more acutely to the existence of dictatorships of various kinds in postcolonial Africa. Ng˜ ug˜ı’s gradual relinquishment of realistic representation for the world of fairy tale and day-dream may provide us with yet another sign of the crisis afflicting the postcolonial novel in Africa generally in its attempts over these past three decades to plot the story of corruption and exploitation under the leadership of civilian-military dictatorships. Economic decline, violence, coup and counter-coup have produced a profound disillusionment among Africa’s populations which have in turn inevitably left their marks on the novel.36

Yet it seems to me that this way of seeing Ng˜ ug˜ı’s development as a novelist not only underplays the formal inventiveness of his earlier more strictly realist mode but also wrongly interprets his later embrace of performance and fable as a symptom of crisis and disillusionment. Wizard of the Crow is not a daydream or a fairy tale but an attempt to plot and contest dictatorship. It presupposes an audience that can engage with the text, that can contest the meanings imposed by the state, that assumes outside the novel the responsibility for criticism, thought, discussion and the imaginative projection of alternatives that the radical opposition movement shoulders within the novel. If prison for Ng˜ ug˜ı ‘is a metaphor for the post-colonial space’ (PGD, 60), a space in which power is imposed from above, in which conduct is regulated and in which time is transformed into mere repetition, then it is in the theatrical space of performance that the power of the postcolonial state can be enacted, censured and superseded. The theatre is the opposite of the prison, while a novel is a kind of mobile theatrical space. Wizard of the Crow is destined to be read aloud in public performances, as Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Devil on the Cross is read in bars frequented by the novel’s protagonists (WC, 592) and by one of them at the start of the novel when she is moonlighting as an office secretary for the doltish businessman Titus Tajirika (WC, 63). Wizard of the Crow is a formally complex novel, one of tall tales, unreliability and exaggeration, that shifts, as Robert L. Colson reminds us, between third- and first-person and even first-person plural narrative voices.37 The plot centres on a young couple, Kam˜ıt˜ı (an unemployed Business Studies graduate whose grandfather fought against the British in the Mau Mau or Land and Freedom struggle of the 1950s) and Grace Nyaw˜ıra (a feminist and radical who we eventually learn is a leader of the revolutionary Movement for the Voice of the People), and their

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differing efforts to investigate and resist the all-pervading venality and power hunger. It is Kam˜ıt˜ı who invents the persona of the Wizard of the Crow when fleeing from the police after a political protest. The Wizard acquires a kind of legendary status and becomes an enemy of the regime by dispensing aid and advice to the poor. Colson argues, as I am doing, that Wizard of the Crow presents a ‘discursive challenge’ to the autocratic politics of the novel’s dictator by contrasting his power with ‘pluralistic modes of community’.38 It does so, according to Colson, partly through its form but principally by way of its inventive use of rumour (which is a site for the free exchange of ideas), its multiple narrators and the way the protracted, eventful narrative time of the novel defies the Ruler’s efforts to suspend time (and therefore the prospect of political change) in an eternal present. The five rumours listed at the start of the novel which seek to explain the Ruler’s mysterious illness have the function, Colson shows, of introducing readers to the multiple popular perspectives from which the novel purports to be written. My sense, however, is that while all of this is undoubtedly taking place in the novel, the most important and effective dialogue or community is that potentially engineered by the novel with its readers through performance. It is not just, as Colson argues, the novel’s multiple narrators or its burgeoning movement of political protest that cast doubt on the Ruler’s profession to be all-powerful and that subvert his meaningmaking power. What Colson’s focus on narrative form does not take into account is the relationship between the novel and its readers and the way in which the novel, like the G˜ıcand˜ı performer, performs power in such a way as to encourage the debunking, interpretation and reperformance of power outside its pages. And it is not a model of liberal ‘pluralist politics’39 that the novel encourages, for in fact the erection of a façade of ‘pluralist’ institutions is by the end of the novel the very means by which the regime seeks to legitimise its continued power. Rather, the novel countenances a revolutionary form of radical democratic empowerment, as we shall see, one that seeks to overturn totally Abur˜ıria’s economic dependency as well as its authoritarian political structures. The events of the novel are as outsized and unpredictable as the book itself, which is a rambling, drawn-out and frequently disorderly (as well as repetitive, digressive and occasionally even seemingly extemporaneous) piece of work. Its sheer breeze-block-sized bulk, like that of the corpulent Ruler himself, in addition to the novel’s innumerable and often superfluous cul-de-sac subplots, reflects the themes of abundance and

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excess. This is the only book I know to have been weighed by a critic!40 Indeed, to return briefly to Bakhtin, there is in this exorbitant corporeality something of what, in the 1940s, the Russian critic saw in Rabelais. For Bakhtin, of course, Gargantua and Pantagruel harnesses the satirical and popular energy of the carnival, which is unleashed against an official and authoritarian culture that is perhaps code in Bakhtin’s work, as Terry Eagleton has observed, for another and infinitely terrifying dictatorship: that of Stalin.41 Yet Bakhtin’s portrait of carnival as a pageant of free and familiar interactions, laughter, mockery, profanations, ‘bringings down to earth’, ‘uncrownings’ and subversive mésalliances 42 does not quite capture what is going on in Wizard of the Crow. For the flouting of order and law is also a property of the Ruler’s chaotic government. Of course, for the rebellious women of Abur˜ıria to bear their arses before the Ruler is an act of scatological protest and parody. Moreover, the Wizard’s benevolent guidance of his clients is an alternative to (and thus a symbolic ‘uncrowning’ of) the rule of the tyrant, whose leadership by contrast is malevolent and self-interested. For Bakhtin, carnival’s seditious vigour upends the world of meanings created by the state. But in Wizard of the Crow the Ruler too uses an excessive disregard for order and law to cow his opponents. My point is that we haven’t yet said enough if we try to explain the fantastic and hyperbolic elements of the novel as mere humorous knockabout at the expense of the powerful. The fantastic elements of Wizard of the Crow in fact constitute a series of metaphors that defamiliarise the reality of dictatorship and force us to examine that reality more closely. Here it is worth recalling what the French philosopher of hermeneutics Paul Ricoeur has to say about living (as opposed to dead or clichéd) metaphors. They oblige us, Ricoeur argues, to rethink our habitual ways of understanding the world.43 By inviting interpretation and by establishing inventive and original connections between the metaphor and the particular phenomenon that the metaphor evokes or describes, metaphors potentially refresh perception and enhance understanding. Its unconcealed figurativeness allows literature to digress from the procedures and expectations of ordinary language. Figures or metaphors call for interpretation, for the connection between the figure and that which it figures is uncertain and contestable. Because literary language is invariably rhetorical and figurative therefore, another of its key properties is its patent susceptibility to interpretation and the integral role it assigns its readers in this process. Of course this is true of all language and not just of the language that we choose to

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call literary. But the special value of literary language is that its unwillingness to make definitive truth claims awakens us to reading’s democratic openness. Literature’s value is its facility for encouraging both creative interpretation and a sceptical attitude to ostensibly compelling authorities, aptitudes that can be put to use in spheres other than the literary. To reveal the contentiousness of the dictator’s voice, its precariousness and its contestable relationship with truth is also to accentuate that voice’s uncertainty and unreliability, its vulnerability to challenge and contradiction by other voices and therefore, contrary to official propaganda, its weakness. Dictatorship, as I the Supreme puts it, digs its ‘own grave in the cemetery of the written word’ (IS, 376). If one believes, as I do, that it is still a useful term then we should understand magic realism as nothing other than a way of ‘mixing up’ ‘reality and illusion’ as Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Titus Tajirika puts it (WC, 446), for the purpose of clarifying the former. Márquez’s work for example, as Stephen Minta has shown, is ‘concerned with the general relationship between writing and power, between literature, myth and truth’. Indeed its continuing investment in the existence and accessibility of truth is what makes it so hard to chalk Márquez’s work up to ‘postmodernism’.44 Despite the official cover-up, the murder of two thousand children in The Autumn of the Patriarch is made known by other witnesses: ‘it was impossible to do away with such a quantity of life without leaving a trace of horror that would travel around the world’ (AP, 92). In One Hundred Years of Solitude (1978) the penultimate Aureliano strives to rescue the memory of the massacred banana plantation workers from official oblivion. Magic realism should be seen as a technique of outrageous juxtaposition; it sets the realistic incongruously alongside the fabulous. The elder José Arcadio and his men in One Hundred Years of Solitude stumble upon an enormous Spanish galleon marooned in the jungle and carpeted inside with little flowers.45 A phlegmatic, deadpan tone is employed to recount the most outlandish and extraordinary events. The pleasure, after the initial shock, is taken in the unfamiliar presentation of seemingly familiar phenomena. The technique, therefore, is a means of disconcerting our preconceptions and forcing their revision. Crucially, the events of the narrative are only initially inexplicable. The galleon mouldering in the jungle may be a metaphor for the absurdity and futility of Spanish colonialism and of all colonialisms. Likewise, the gringos’ ‘insistent plan to carry off our territorial waters as surety for the interest on the foreign debt’ (AP, 188) in The Autumn of the Patriarch (the Caribbean Sea is eventually carried off

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‘in numbered pieces to plant it far from the hurricanes in the blood-red dawns of Arizona’ [AP, 208]), might be either (or both) a specific figure for the US-induced secession of Panama from Colombia or a general one for the intolerable sacrifices the postcolonial state is forced to make as a result of its permanent indebtedness. The serious, as opposed to merely jocose or irreverent, point being made by magic realist texts is one that was made more assertively by Márquez in his Nobel address: Latin American history is too distinctive and too complex to be grasped without the kind of interpretative effort usually reserved only for literary texts, an effort that is positively beseeched by the outlandish and surprising incidents of Márquez’s novels.46 Magic realism, then, queries the conventional distinction between truth and fiction in the interests of the former not of the latter; it highlights the unavailability of, in this case, Latin American history and political reality to conventional realistic expectations and obliges us instead to look more closely and with much greater interpretative resourcefulness at a world that is more strange, distinctive and intractable than ignorant and unsympathetic observers usually give it credit for. The magical aspects of a magical realist novel are less pure fantasy than metaphors that beseech decipherment or interpretation and therefore rejuvenate or reperform conventional ways of understanding and describing, in both Márquez’s and Ng˜ ug˜ı’s case, the problem of dictatorship. Wizard of the Crow therefore incites not scepticism about truth (in the way that a kind of glib postmodernism might simply run truth and fantasy together) but scepticism about received truths, which the novel performs and invites us to question. In Ng˜ ug˜ı’s ‘magical realism’, as in Marquez’s according to Timothy Brennan, ‘there lingers a confidence in a reality which fantasy can allow us to rediscover’.47 With its similarly exaggerated, satirical and frequently disconcerting performances, Wizard of the Crow compels the re-examination of the postcolonial state and succeeds in alerting us to the state’s strangeness and its vulnerability to critique and to revolutionary political change. Hence Joseph McLaren’s description of Wizard of the Crow as ‘satirical magic realism’.48 Many of the novel’s characters are cartoons and caricatures. Markus Machokali, the Ruler’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, goes to London for plastic surgery to enlarge his eyes so that he can seek out the enemies of the dictator (WC, 13). Not to be outdone, Silver Sikiokuu, the head of the secret service, has his ears enlarged in Paris, the better to spy on the citizenry (WC, 14). A special chamber in the State House is built

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with the bones of the many citizens the Ruler has had killed, symbolic reminders of a system built on violence (WC, 10–11). What I don’t think has been appreciated sufficiently in previous discussions of Wizard of the Crow is that the principal object of the novel’s ‘satirical magical realism’ is in fact the origins of African dictatorship in the whole structure of global capitalism in its post-sixties financialised avatar. Although the adjectives change from time to time, the novel insists, financialised capitalism is still capitalism and capitalism is still imperialist in essence, at least according to the novel’s most articulate and radical voice. What the novel chronicles and dissects are the expedient mutations of that system into its latest variant, ‘imperial corporonialism, as proudly claimed by the new ogres’ (WC, 760), in Nyaw˜ıra’s words. Indeed these pragmatic transmutations only mask the long-term continuity in imperialist social and economic relations in postcolonial Africa. Time, the novel suggests, has been somehow suspended there, in the same way that people and animals have been petrified in the disturbing and uncanny ‘Museum of Arrested Motion’ accidentally discovered by Titus and his wife Vinjinia (WC, 443). Similarly, in the prison house of the Ruler’s jilted wife Rachel, all the clocks have been stopped at the exact moment she dared to question his raping of schoolgirls (WC, 8). If the necessary and longed-for (though not, of course, inevitable) passing away of oppressive and exploitative systems would for Ng˜ ug˜ı represent at last a substantive form of political and social progress then postcolonial Africa has in fact been trapped since the colonial period in a sort of ‘homogeneous, empty time’, to use a phrase of Walter Benjamin’s.49 The most potent weapon of ‘the eternal Ruler of the Free Republic of Abur˜ıria’ (WC, 17) is his power to forestall progress and thus arrest time: [H]e had sat on the throne so long that even he could not remember when his reign began. His rule had no beginning and no end… Children had been born and had given birth to others and those others to others and so on, and his rule has survived all the generations. So that when some people heard that before him there had been a first Ruler, preceded by a succession of governors and sultans all the way from the era of the Arabs, the Turks, the Italians, to that of the British, they would simply shake their heads in disbelief saying, no, no, those are just the tales of a daydreamer: Abur˜ıria had never had and could never have another ruler, because had not this man’s reign begun before the world began and would end only after the world has ended? (WC, 6)

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This is a potted radical version of Kenya’s history of course, but it also foregrounds the disturbing (and discouraging) continuities in the history of all of postcolonial Africa. ‘The Great Dictator of Abur˜ıria alias the Ruler of the Free Republic of Abur˜ıria’ (WC, 230), who like Idi Amin rose through the ranks of the colonial army and became the departing power’s faux-nationalist protégé (WC, 231–2), who carries a Hastings Banda-esque fly whisk and like Mobutu sports a leopardskin toque, and who like any number of chiefs and potentates is the head of a one-party state, stands in for all of Africa’s new ‘Rulers’ in the years immediately after independence whom he resembles in ways too copious to enumerate. Similarly the dependent neo-colony of Abur˜ıria is the representative postcolonial state, its regime resting on the ‘two main pillars’ of ‘the armed forces and the West’ (WC, 645), its Ruler taking cuts on defence contracts (WC, 712–3) and its government’s top brass ‘sniffing out’ ‘anti-government plots’ while they pocket bribes and moonlight as directors of firms controlled by foreign companies, ‘particularly those involved in the exploration of oil and the mining of precious metals’ (WC, 9). Whatever modifiers and prefixes are attached by economists and others to words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘colonialism’ and whatever unscrupulous rebranding exercises are contrived by the regime and its P.R.-conscious American sponsors, these initial images of permanency and of the absence (and even unimaginableness) of change lend emphasis instead to the deplorably unchanging facts of exploitation and dependency in postcolonial Africa. ‘Independence’ in Abur˜ıria is, then, the period during which the legacies and imbalances of the colonial period are further entrenched via the neocolonial patronage of the Western powers, then by structural adjustment and latterly by the additional, exceptionally cynical machinations of the ‘Global Bank’ and ‘its policy-making body’ (WC, 649) the ‘G.M.F.’ (the Global Ministry of Finance). Towards the end of the novel Ng˜ ug˜ı lets this barely concealed cat out of the bag, presumably accidentally, by referring instead to the ‘IMF’ (WC, 633). Indeed when Kam˜ıt˜ı is told that Titus, to whom he has gone to beg for a job, is ‘attending a dinner reception in honour of the mission from the GB’ (WC, 51) it is Great Britain and not the Global Bank that he assumes this venal plutocrat must be in cahoots with. Given the colonial intentions of them both, Kam˜ıt˜ı’s confusion is understandable, for the British Empire has indeed been replaced, as Jameson puts it, by the International Monetary Fund.50 Both the

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IMF and the World Bank, as Prashad reminds us, are ‘institutions for the maintenance of colonial domination by other means’.51 It is worth remembering that the increasing financialisation of world capitalism since the 1970s, far from being an accidental process, has in fact been part of a general effort, as the last chapter sought to show, to restore profitable conditions for the accumulation of capital by ‘rolling back’ the achievements and aspirations of radical movements in both the first and third worlds. Indeed financialisation always represents for Arrighi a calculated response on the part of the ruling class of a particular hegemonic power (in this case the United States) to a profound crisis of profitability. Financialisation is an attempt to facilitate capital accumulation within existing territorial constraints by diverting surplus capital to speculation on asset values (LTC, 6). Financialisation has not been a merely contingent or accidental aspect of the crisis in world capitalism during this period therefore, but rather the most important way in which the US-centred phase of accumulation has sought to counteract its own long-term stagnation. Financialisation and Africa’s ‘recolonization’ have been two interconnected aspects of this process. The stupendous growth of financial profits, the permeation of societies by financial relations and the domination of economic policy by the profits of the finance sector have been deliberate aims of state policy in many Western economies, as Costas Lapavitsas has shown in his comprehensive history of financialised capitalism. This phenomenon has resulted not from arbitrary decisions taken by policymakers but ‘from changes deep within capitalist accumulation’.52 Since the surplus could not easily be absorbed by consumption and investment in the productive sector, Lapavitsas reasons, ‘the spectre of stagnation hung over mature capitalist countries’ in the 1970s. Thus the surplus found its way to US corporations and government debt and to Wall Street where it was invested in speculative activities, in all manner of complicated ‘instruments’ such as futures and derivatives, and in unsustainable Ponzi schemes such as those centred on household debt. Much of this surplus capital originated, as we have seen, in the manufacturing economies of Germany, Japan and other parts of East Asia as well as the Gulf monarchies and Saudi Arabia. In addition, a gigantic debt-recycling mechanism, whereby ‘structural adjustment’ loans to impoverished African (and other postcolonial) states generated in return, as we have seen, around five trillion dollars for their first-world

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creditors and thus further stoked the catastrophic financialisation of firstworld economies, was an essential part of this immensely profitable but reckless as well as humanly destructive arrangement. The best studies of what Godwin R. Murunga calls the ‘authoritarian shock therapy’ of structural adjustment in Kenya are the essays contained in Godwin Murunga’s Kenya: The Struggle for Democracy and Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo’s twin volumes Our Continent, Our Future and African Voices on Structural Adjustment.53 Again, what emerges from these detailed studies is the galling continuity in Kenya’s history of economic and political centralisation despite or rather because of the injurious ministrations of structural adjustment. Mark Curtis shows that the elimination of radical opposition during the brutal State of Emergency declared by the British colonial authorities in 1952 in addition to the atrocities that followed, as well as the subsequent cultivation of an African elite to whom most of the land was transferred (at a high price) when direct colonial rule was wound up, were all designed to foster a kind of dependent independence. The aim was ‘to maintain an economy favourable to private investment, to limit nationalisations, and to maintain the chief export-earner – European dominated capital agriculture, and an economic structure congenial to it’.54 The speedy transfer of the nation’s agricultural wealth into foreign hands, facilitated by a pliant class of rentseekers that dominated political power in the new nation state, was simply how the colony and then the ‘postcolony’ of Kenya had been designed.55 After independence key sectors, including manufacturing, services and especially agriculture, remained under the control of foreign capital. Though rates of economic growth were high throughout the 1960s and 1970s the proceeds of that growth were thus not accompanied by rising standards of living since they accrued mainly to foreign firms and to the local bourgeoisie, as Murunga explains. The economic growth of the 1960s and 1970s in Kenya was, to a considerable extent, a reflection of investments undertaken by foreign capital in alliance with a local petit bourgeoisie who assumed the reins of state power at independence. This bourgeoisie used independence to take control of the state and used foreign capital to gain a foothold into the key business and productive sectors of the economy for purposes of personal wealth accumulation.56

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That said, in the two decades after independence the state-led model of development did to an extent enable some of the harshest effects of inequality to be offset. Agriculture and industry were superintended by parastatals and marketing boards. The state was the leading employer and intervened to provide and subsidise health, education and infrastructure. Much of this system was based, however, on the centralised and even personalised system of rule under Kenyatta. Kenya under Kenyatta’s successor Daniel Arap Moi was thus ill-prepared to weather the harsher winds that blew through the world economy from the late 1970s due mainly to the global economic downturn and the fall in global commodity prices. The structural adjustment programmes imposed on Kenya in the 1980s and 1990s were ostensibly aimed at eliminating patrimonialism and rentseeking by this closely intertwined political and economic elite. But the centralisation of political and economic power was simply how Kenya has been constructed at independence with the active connivance of Western governments, for whom Kenya was a model of capitalist economic growth during the Cold War. The elite had consistently battled trade unions and other opponents and Kenya had effectively been a one-party state since 1969. Little of substance changed in the political and economic structure of Kenyan independence with the onset of structural adjustment. Initial loans from IMF in 1975 and 1978 to offset temporary balance of payments deficits (the second in exchange for measures enforcing wage restraints) were followed by further structural adjustment lending (SAL) in 1980 and 1982. Budgetary constraints, privatisations, currency devaluations, the reduction of trade tariffs, the removal of exchange and price controls all led of course to much greater levels of income inequality. These technocratic negotiations were of course highly undemocratic, to the extent that these ‘reforms’ were ‘the basis on which Moi solidified his authoritarian rule’.57 The use of arbitrary detention helped to silence opposition groups. The process was compounded by the centralisation of political power in the ruling party or at least its powerful disciplinary committee that purged opposition and enforced loyalty to the president. The privatisation of state enterprises and the lack of investment in infrastructure and public services exacerbated both inequality and corruption. It was internal resistance not external donors that brought about the new government in 2002. Michela Wrong chronicles the elitism, corruption and ethnic patronage that have persistently bedevilled Kenya under British rule, throughout the command-economy reign of Kenyatta and

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the asset-stripping feast of structural adjustment and lately during the business-as-usual administrations of Kibaki and Uhuru Kenyatta.58 Wizard of the Crow gets underway in the midst of the era of structural adjustment. The catalyst for the protests that initially imperil the Ruler’s regime is his madcap Marching to Heaven scheme, a gigantic tower that he hopes will allow him to converse with the almighty and for which he requires the financial support of the Global Bank (WC, 16). The arrival of a delegation from the Global Bank to assess the project provides an opportunity for the novel to stage a radically defamiliarising performance of power that is then disrupted and subverted by the growing and emboldened forces of the Movement for the Voice of the People. A group of beggars, whose forlorn but otherwise unthreatening presence usually provides Western visitors with a touch of picturesque authenticity (WC, 35), starts shouting slogans at a lavish reception for the ‘visiting dignitaries’ at the Paradise Hotel. ‘The March to Heaven Is Led by Dangerous Snakes’ is a chant that recalls the release of snakes by the women of the Movement at the Ruler’s birthday celebration at the start of the novel. The novel is replete with these set-piece occasions in which the Ruler and his regime set out to perform his supposedly omnipotent power but at which rebellious audiences invariably ‘outperform the dictator’s own performance’ (WC, 670), just as rioting beggars and women lifting their skirts before the Ruler at the official dedication of Marching to Heaven (WC, 250) will later dispute that power again. More and more the Ruler becomes ‘a director helplessly watching his actors straying from the script’ (WC, 682). Something of this extemporaneous disputatious attitude is encouraged in the novel’s readers. Invariably, the episodes themselves, the Ruler’s disastrous trip to the United States for example or his bizarre illness, are imperfectly conveyed by incomplete, often conflicting and impressionistic reports, rumours, anecdotes and myths. The novel at these points becomes like a lengthy and convoluted game of ‘broken telephone’ whose barely detectable events are presented to the reader only after being forced through several layers of misapprehension, distortion and exaggeration. The formal effect is not only to defamiliarise the rituals and practices of dictatorship by exaggerating and lampooning but also to substitute a democratic hubbub of different voices and perspectives for the Ruler’s delusions of omniscience. What is important is not just the form of these occasions, where for example the monologic claims of ‘the state radio, nicknamed the

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Dictator’s Mouthpiece’, are subverted by the more dialogic ‘counterclaims’ of ‘the people’s word of mouth, nicknamed the Bush Telegraph’ (WC, 670), but the precise content of those claims and counterclaims. Their performative disruption of the dictator’s power notwithstanding, the beggars’ ‘slogans beyond the decorum of begging’—‘Marching to Heaven is Marching to Hell. Your Strings of Loans are Chains of Slavery. Your Loans Are the Cause of Begging. We Beggars Beg the End of Begging’—(WC, 74) both encapsulate and incite a radical critique of structural adjustment. The slogans stress the fact that structural adjustment’s inevitable (and no doubt intended) result is the reverse of its professed objective, that indebtedness is but the latest form of colonial enslavement and that what looks like philanthropy is just another way of enforcing dependency. The slogans, in short, are an explicit protest against a conjoined power, of the dictatorship and its accomplices in the global financial institutions, that is beggaring the country for the sake of a paltry and highly conditional loan. That this piffling advance will be spent on a colossal vanity project, in return for an indefinite plight of indebtedness and entrenched dependency, is of course a means of highlighting the predicament of Africa’s peoples during the era of structural adjustment, who found themselves under the heels both of a profligate and tyrannical national ‘elite’ and of a similarly corrupt and self-seeking global oligarchy of states and creditors. The ‘missionaries’ (WC, 135) of the Global Bank are but the latest in a long line of visiting evangelists for capital itself, their aim being, as Nyaw˜ıra says, to put ‘us in a permanent debt trap’ (WC, 86). The really valuable thing about Wizard of the Crow’s satirically exaggerated portrayal of the activities in Africa of the US government and the global financial institutions is that it charts both the unchanging nature of their imperialist designs as well as the cynical metamorphoses of their rhetoric in response to democratic pressures. For by the time the novel eventually concludes, we are in a more or less unaltered era of ‘corporonial’ power, albeit one masked by the regime’s duplicitous rhetoric of ‘good governance’ and ‘multiparty democracy’. The main concern of a subsequent Global Bank delegation, Machokali tells the Ruler, ‘is only those forces, remnants of a bygone socialist age, that threaten stability and pose danger to the free flow of capital’ (WC, 242), the standard euphemism of ‘stability’ furnishing a pretext for a violent crackdown on the Movement’s activities. The enormous queues that are developing in Abur˜ıria as the unemployed desperately seek work and the

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middle-class jockeys for a slice of the Global Bank loan are presented to the visiting delegation as proof that the ‘Abur˜ırian masses are ready to forgo clothes, houses, education, medicine, and even food in order to meet any and every condition the Bank may impose on the funds it releases for Marching to Heaven’ (WC, 248). This mythical commitment to the impossible task of paying ‘back every cent of the principle [sic] along with interest on interests ad infinitum’ (WC, 248) really would represent a permanent condition of enslavement. Yet the rhetoric of the Ruler’s flunkies is belied by the growing restiveness of the queues, which become ‘free spaces’ and ‘a site of democracy where gatherings did not require police permits’ (WC, 199), and by the queues’ receptiveness to the revolutionary messages of the Movement. Indeed it is precisely the imminence of a potential political revolution that prompts the Ruler and his Western backers to make a rhetorical volteface, which the novel ruthlessly and lengthily lampoons. His old allies and paymasters in New York and Washington start to snub the Ruler. Their apparently shifting post-Cold War priorities are brought home to him during the fiasco of his visit to Washington. The bewildered and ailing Ruler is denied presidential ‘face time’ and even a face-saving appearance on ‘GNN’s Meet the Global Mighty’ T.V. show (WC, 243). The Global Bank refuses to release the funds for Marching to Heaven ‘on the basis of the current representation’ (WC, 485, emphasis in the original). The stress on job creation in Abur˜ıria’s application is deemed to be ‘a case of outdated Keynesian economics’ which has no place ‘in the modern global economy’ (WC, 485). Assuming that his massacres of workers and his sterling Cold War service record will be enough to secure the loan, the Ruler is struck dumb by this apparently strictly economic rationale. Initially slow to catch up with the Bank’s latest modus operandi, he is taught a lesson by a delegation of US powerbrokers. The president’s ‘special envoy’ is ‘alarmed at the possibility of a complete breakdown of the rule of law, and there was nothing worse for a people than their country falling into the hands of thugs, evildoers, and warlords and becoming a terrorist haven’ (WC, 578). It is the idiom of the ‘war on terror’ not that of the Cold War with which the Ruler must learn to mask his ‘strongarm tactics against dissidents’ (WC, 579). And instead of showing the massacres live on TV he must learn to conceal them, the US president’s envoy makes clear, beneath the duplicitous rhetoric of a new ‘global order’ of democracy, freedom and cultural sensitivity.

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The West and the civilized world are eternally grateful to you for your role in our victory over the evil empire. We are now embarking on a new mission of forging a global order. That is why I am now visiting all our friends to tell them to move in step with the world. To everything its season, says the preacher. There was a time when slavery was good. It did its work, and when it finished creating capital, it withered and died a natural death. Colonialism was good. It spread industrial culture of shared resources and markets. But to revive colonialism would now be an error. There was a time when the cold war dictated our every calculation in domestic and international relations. It is over. We are in the post-cold war era, and our calculations are affected by the laws and needs of globalization. The history of capital can be summed up in one phrase: in search of freedom. Freedom to expand, and now it has a chance at the entire globe for its theater. It needs a democratic space to move as its own logic demands. So I have been sent to urge you to start thinking about turning your country into a democracy. Who knows? Maybe with your blessings, some of your ministers might even want to form opposition parties. (WC, 580, emphasis in the original)

I make no apologies for quoting this passage in full, for it is the key moment in the whole novel. What is belied by the upbeat twaddle about markets and shared resources is the strictly ideological portrayal of the most deceptive euphemism of all, ‘globalization’, as a kind of unalterable historical force beyond human influence. According to this homily’s disarmingly candid and bathetic denouement, ‘a democratic space’ is now required for what Immanuel Wallerstein, like the president’s envoy, characterises as the distinguishing and indispensable feature of the ‘historical social system’ of capitalism: capital’s relentless self-expansion, ‘the only constant law of the new global order’ according to the Global Bank’s diplomats (WC, 497–8).59 ‘What we are saying is this’, the envoy stresses in response to the Ruler’s ministers’ distress at the prospect of democratic reform: ‘many parties, one aim – a free and stable world where our money can move across borders without barriers erected by the misguided nationalism of the outmoded nation-state’ (WC, 580). Capital demands a carefully managed façade of democracy, in other words, not the various ‘barriers’ that would be erected by the ‘extreme democracy’ or ‘direct democracy’ of the queues and ‘people’s courts’ that so terrify the diplomats of the Global Bank because they are starting to ‘challenge the social order’ (WC, 499).

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Abur˜ıria is all of Africa, as I have said; economic dependency and authoritarian political structures are part of a general condition. The country’s story, this conversation between the Ruler and his American allies reveals, is also the more or less unchanging story of the entire continent from the colonial period right through to the supposedly postcolonial (but in fact relentlessly neocolonial) present. If His Excellency US Ambassador Gabriel Gemstone’s forename announces the imminent arrival of the regime’s salvation (in the form of further loans, ‘support’ and ‘investment’) then his surname, as well as his accomplice’s rhetoric, flaunt the basis of US interests in this enduringly dependent and tyrannised African territory. In 1989 the US Ambassador to Kenya Smith Hempstone did in fact force Moi to accede to bogus multiparty elections in return for further aid.60 Not only the United States but all ‘the major Western democracies’ urge the Ruler to find ways to ‘end the unrest in the country’ because they are acutely conscious that ‘[t]he West had invested a lot in the future of Abur˜ıria and was quite naturally anxious about developments that might jeopardize its interests’. Gemstone is therefore accompanied by the French ambassador, ‘Monsieur Jean Pierre Sartre, not to be confused with the existential philosopher of the same name’ (WC, 640), the salient distinction presumably being Jean-Paul ’s fiercely anti-colonial convictions. If the Global Bank is going to freeze all funds ‘until the Abur˜ırian government had instituted economic and political reforms and took concrete steps to end inflation and corruption’ (WC, 649) then the only option left to the by now grotesquely swollen and befuddled Ruler is to give birth to ‘Baby D’, a fraudulent exercise in multiparty democracy (WC, 698). The Ruler will henceforth be the head of all political parties, he tells parliament, all of which will choose him as their candidate for the presidency, in the same way perhaps that, say, Cameroon’s Paul Biya went in the 1990s from being the leader of a one-party state to the (repeatedly) ‘democratically’ elected president.61 Opposition leaders will be brought inside a government comprised of ‘technocrats, war heroes, and proven businessmen’ (WC, 704). The assembled ambassadors and envoys warmly applaud the Ruler when he stresses ‘that whichever party from among the hundreds under his leadership came to power, Abur˜ıria would remain a friend and trustworthy partner of the Western alliance. I worked hand in hand with you in fighting world communism, he said, and now we shall stand shoulder to shoulder in building the new global system of

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guided freedom and openness’ (WC, 699). So there will be a sham exercise in open government, the Ruler promises that an ‘anticorruption bill’ will be introduced to parliament with the aim of eradicating the thought crimes of the Movement (WC, 700), and women are to be appointed to the positions of ‘assistant ministers and managing directors of the banks’ (WC, 735). These cosmetic ‘reforms’ will allow everything to continue as before. The ‘Minister of Finance and business hero Titus Tajirika’ signs ‘agreements with several oil companies to explore oil and natural gas at the coast and mining companies to prospect for gold, diamonds, and other precious metals’ (WC, 710). A counterfeit process of democratic empowerment steals the Movement’s thunder. The global financial institutions, Titus reassures the Ruler, which have now released the frozen funds, can now assume the role previously occupied by ‘the British East Africa Company’ and the ‘one-man corporation’ of King Leopold. The world will become one corporate globe divided into the incorporating and the incorporated. We should volunteer Abur˜ıria to be the first to be wholly managed by private capital, to become the first voluntary corporate colony, a corporony, the first in the new global order. With the privatization of Abur˜ıria, and with the NGOs relieving us of social services, the country becomes your real estate… The corporonial powers will reward you as a modern visionary. (WC, 746)

Who knows if ‘corporonialism’s’ accomplices really do talk to one another with such candour? Whether they do or not, the graphic performance of this barefaced conspiracy to simulate democratic institutions points to (or is a kind of figure or metaphor for) a larger truth about the deplorable continuities in African history as well as for the enduring collusion between authoritarianism in Africa and the activities of Westerncontrolled financial institutions in forestalling democratic demands that are either maligned as ‘communist’ or ‘terroristic’ or else, as in this case, cynically co-opted. As McLaren observes, the novel ‘shows that the West and global capital are implicated in the dilemmas of African leadership’.62 And yet that is something of an understatement. For the Abur˜ırian state and foreign corporations are not so much stricken by dilemmas as ‘all united by one slogan: ‘A loot-a continua’’ (WC, 201), at once an echo and an inversion of the motto of FRELIMO’s struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Mozambique: A luta continua (the struggle continues). The outcome of independence is struggle, as ever

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in a continent dominated and fleeced by external powers and domestic tyrants, against systematic larceny.

Wizard of the Crow and a Democracy of Readers We need to reckon with Wizard of the Crow’s satirical insight into the remorselessly imperialist designs of Western states and financial institutions and therefore with the novel’s extended critique of the myth that ‘multiparty democracy’ represents any sort of substantive political or economic change in postcolonial Africa. It is not the case, of course, that Ng˜ ug˜ı dismisses the potential for that kind of change. The Movement ‘inserts’ its socialist ideas into the ‘spontaneous demonstrations’ (WC, 666) of the queues and appears to augur a ‘new democratic surge’ (WC, 661). But the march on parliament, ‘the Day of National Rebirth or SelfRenewal’ (WC, 666) and the general strike do not succeed in fomenting a revolutionary overthrow of the regime. By the end of the novel the Movement is gathering its forces in the mountains, having become a sort of striking but appealing coalition between syndicalists, guerrillas and ecowarriors (WC, 759). Despite the Ruler’s desire to ‘freeze or even abolish the future’ (WC, 750), the Movement is again starting to organise, this time against Baby D (WC, 744). What the novel succeeds in bringing home to its readers is similar to what occurs to Kam˜ıt˜ı as he is introduced to the burgeoning revolutionary movement: Maybe knowledge was nothing more than the art of looking at what we already know with different eyes, and asking different questions. Knowledge is the discovery of the magic of the ordinary. Like words put into song. (WC, 759)

What is presented afresh by this novel and what it renders at once startling and newly unendurable are ‘the incredible turns the country had taken since independence’ (WC, 196) as well as the excruciating fact of imperialism’s durability in postcolonial Africa. The Ruler, like Moi, is not his nation’s first leader. Nor is he its last, for in a swift and mysterious coup after the Ruler’s ‘SelfImposed Disappearance’ Titus Tajirika has himself crowned ‘the new ruler of Abur˜ıria, Emperor Titus Flavius Vespasianus Whitehead’ (WC, 753) before oxymoronically declaring a ‘new era of imperial democracy’ (WC, 754). But even these changes are comparatively superficial

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when set alongside Abur˜ıria’s starkly foregrounded continuities. Little has changed in Abur˜ıria, just as too little has changed, Ng˜ ug˜ı insists, in postcolonial Kenya. Not the ostensible transition in Kenya to multiparty democracy in 1991, nor the downfall of Moi and the election of Moi’s former deputy Mwai Kibaki in 2002, nor even independence itself, have signalled a qualitative shift away from what Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work diagnoses as Kenya’s entrenched problems of dependency, inequality and state authoritarianism. That fact was no doubt made all too clear to Ng˜ ug˜ı and his wife Njeeri when they were brutally attacked on their return to Kenya in August 2003 after twenty years of exile. But lest we become discouraged by the fact that the regime, like the Hydra, simply grows a new head to replace the one that has been lopped off, it is worth stressing that the forms of discovery and awareness described by Kam˜ıt˜ı are also potential effects of reading the novel. In other words, the prospects of a genuinely democratic revolution germinate both within the novel and without. If the Ruler and his accomplices seek ‘to recover the image of the State’ (WC, 225), to present an image of accountability, peacefulness, unity and permanence to the state’s subjects as well as to visiting tourists and ‘dignitaries’, then Wizard of the Crow responds by cultivating an informed distrust of the authoritarian state’s singular viewpoint and of the assorted myths that it peddles about itself. In a state in which, as Sikiokuu tells the Wizard, ‘we do actually imprison people for asking questions, but only those that question established truths or that undermine the rule of law or how this country is governed’ (WC, 410), that informed distrust is the precondition of the democratic empowerment that the novel countenances and forecasts but does not realise or even fully anticipate. Power is being performed in a way that is arresting and outlandish enough to invite the scrutiny of power, the revelation of its origins and the accentuation of its vulnerability to alternatives. I do not think we need to fret too much about who the audiences and recipients of these performances are, as critics of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work sometimes do. The novel was first published in the G˜ık˜ uy˜ u language in a multivolume format intended for wide circulation and public performance in Kenya itself. Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work is also, of course, indubitably a central part of the canon of Anglophone world literatures. Ng˜ ug˜ı’s subsequent English-language version of the novel was thus guaranteed a relatively wide circulation among Anglophone readerships within and especially beyond Africa. Indeed the novel is acutely conscious that it constitutes

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a kind of intervention in (and even a sceptical rejoinder to) Western readers’ images of ‘Africa’. We learn that tourists and foreign journalists, like the ‘missionaries’ of the Global Bank, hope to find in Abur˜ıria picturesque images in Madhu Krishnan’s words ‘of Africa as a place of exotic fascination and unspeakable suffering’.63 ‘Pictures of beggars or wild animals were what many tourists sent back home as proof of having been in Africa’ (WC, 35). Journalists ‘believed that a news story from Africa without pictures of people dying from wretched poverty, famine, or ethnic warfare could not possibly be interesting to their audience back home’ (WC, 74). The novel flaunts and makes available for critique these signifiers of the continent’s radical difference as well as its dependency and helplessness, Africa as a ‘savage place, incapable of democracy and independent leadership and still in need of the firm guidance of a wiser and more just west’.64 Wizard of the Crow therefore eschews what Richard K. Priebe has called the ‘extreme pornography’65 of violence, the ‘very idea of Africa in Western discourse’ situating Africa as a—if not the— ‘place of violence’.66 What the novel’s performances of power reveal to be the persistent feature of postcolonial African history, the necessity and reality of struggle, potentially refutes the stereotypical and self-serving perceptions and the nefarious interventions of unsympathetic non-African percipients. I would go further and suggest that the novel’s simultaneous portrayal and encouragement of the kind of democratic participation required to bring Abur˜ıria’s long history of dictatorial rule to an end, just like its radical performance of the unfinished struggle between dictatorship and democratic empowerment, speak with comparable force to all of the novel’s many audiences. Ng˜ ug˜ı’s ‘quest for relevance’ should be construed not as an exclusionary move but, to use Patrick Williams’ word for it, as a process of ‘democratization’.67 It is no doubt true that this text is, in Gikandi’s words, a ‘part of the passion play of Kenyan politics’ for ‘those readers – the insiders – who can make sense of the winks’ and allusions to the Moi period that came to an end in 2002.68 And I take Mike Kuria’s word for it that Wizard of the Crow is written originally in a complicated and demanding mixture of Gikuyu, Kiswahili and English.69 But that is no reason to think, as Kuria does, that the original version of the novel therefore excludes its intended readership in Kenya, any more than the allusive and both language- and code-switching ‘English’ version excludes Anglophone readers. I am at a loss to see why making demands of one’s readers, even linguistic demands, constitutes a form of exclusion. No reader of any kind could ever be

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expected to, as it were, ‘get’ every single one of the multitudinous and often cryptic metaphors and references in a text so teemingly allusive as this one. Ng˜ ug˜ı’s ‘quest for relevance’, his famous decision after the publication of Petals of Blood in 1977 to focus on writing in G˜ık˜ uy˜ u, was always just that, a ‘quest’ or earnest attempt to speak more forcefully and effectively to an audience of Gikuyu-speakers that he worried had previously been prevented from reading his work. It was never an exclusion of other audiences, which is why I think it is unhelpful to divide Wizard of the Crow’s readers into insiders and outsiders. The ‘quest for relevance’ was an effort to establish meaningful contact with readerships ‘in Africa and the world over demanding liberation’, to use Ng˜ ug˜ı’s own words, especially (but not only) those readerships in Kenya for whom liberation is a particularly urgent need. ‘It is a call for the rediscovery of the real language of humankind, the language of struggle’.70 Wizard of the Crow, in Krishnan’s astute judgement, ‘is a novel written for multiple purposes, to multiple audiences, with multiple frames of reference and levels of encoding’.71 The novel reveals to its different audiences that Abur˜ıria, like the many postcolonial African nation states for which it stands, is neither helpless nor homogeneous, but rather dynamic, polyphonic, rumbustious as well as potentially or rather incompletely liberated and democratic. It is, ultimately, the text itself and especially its provocative, critiqueinciting images of African dictatorship’s longevity and of dictatorship’s lastingly cynical collusion with global capital that potentially arouse in readers of all kinds the democratic aptitudes of inquisitiveness and scepticism about the stories that the state tells about itself. After all, the control of writing and of the production of texts is a vital weapon in the dictatorship’s armoury. Among the regime’s hundreds of political prisoners are ‘a few authors and journalists all held without trial including one historian who had been in prison for ten years for crimes that included writing a book called People Make History, Then a Ruler Makes It His Story’ (WC, 20). The official newspaper is the Daily Parrot (WC, 21), which is presumably a reference to Moi’s notorious call for his compatriots to ‘sing like parrots’ in praise of official propaganda as well as being an allusion to the servility of the official media in a dictatorship.72 It is in order to ‘protect the country’ (WC, 21) against these ‘malicious rumormongers, so-called historians, and novelists, and to counter their lies and distortions’ (WC, 21) that the Ruler appoints Dr. Luminous Karamu-Mbuya-Ituika, the former socialist pamphleteer and graduate of

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East Germany’s Institute of Marxist Revolutionary Journalism, as his official biographer and thus author of ‘the true history’ of Abur˜ıria. But the official biographer proves no more capable of ‘protecting the country’ from rumour, gossip and disagreement than the ‘terrorist[s] of the intellect’ (20), dissident writers, of whom the Ruler lives in fear. The futile efforts of the official biographer (or ‘TOB’ [WC, 479]) to use the shifty and ambiguous medium of language to establish and impart the myth of the Ruler’s omnipotence in the end prove only that the creation of disputes and distortions are in fact intrinsic to what texts are and what texts do. TOB’s book and pen are ‘so huge that both items could be seen from afar’ (WC, 247). But when the Ruler asks TOB to read him a chapter from his gargantuan work-in-progress, an account of the uncertain events of the Ruler’s visit to his insubordinate wife Rachel and of the fireball that conveniently consumes her prison, he suddenly realises that the loyal biographer knew too much, that if he could write and record what happened openly, so vividly, and so graphically, an account that completely contradicted the official version of the Ruler’s and the generals’ heroics as they struggled with bombs exploding, what could he inadvertently say about the story of Rachel and the plantation fire? This man had no imagination to sugarcoat reality and make it more palatable. (WC, 709)

Crucially, it is texts’ capacity to cast doubt on official narratives in order to reveal the truth that is so politically dangerous. Texts unavoidably introduce the possibility of alternative accounts and interpretations, since an indeterminate, provisional and therefore questionable presentation of ‘the official version’ is what makes them texts in the first place. TOB is ‘never seen again, with rumors later claiming that the man had been crushed under the weight of his huge pen and notebook’ (WC, 709), textuality overwhelming those who vainly attempt to control it. Again, readers’ attention is drawn to the act of sugarcoating but only so that the unpalatable reality might be made known. We are treated to several versions of the Ruler’s rise to power, to cite a further example, but they all ‘agree on one thing: the Ruler’s rise to power had something to do with his alliance with the colonial state and the white forces behind it’ (WC, 233). Similarly, there are many different accounts in the novel of the Ruler’s deplorable career but what they all have in common is an awareness of his regime’s servile subordination to its colonial and neocolonial

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masters, notwithstanding the official myths about the Ruler’s regime’s strength, the nation’s unity or even its surprise conversion to democratic accountability. Undeterred by the subversive power of texts, the Ruler publishes stacks of copies of ‘The Birth of Baby D: The Ruler and the Evolution of an African Statesman: An Objective Biography, written by Henry Morton Stanley, A White Englishman’ (WC, 743). Not an ‘objective’ history at all presumably, but rather a manifestly slanted portrayal of these unedifying events ‘in darkest Africa’, The Birth of Baby D is another example of what the regime understands by ‘committed art’, the purpose of which is to turn the Ruler ‘into a righteous deity’ (WC, 667) and ‘cleanse the minds of the young of all rebelliousness’ (WC, 702). All of Abur˜ıria’s ‘institutions of learning’ ‘teach only those ideas that come from the supreme educator’. Indeed ‘all books published in the country would carry the name of the Ruler as the original author’, even religious texts carrying ‘prefaces and introductions by the Ruler’, so that the country’s education system ‘was bound to produce students with a uniform knowledge streaming from the same source: the Ruler or those imbued with his thought’ (WC, 565). It goes without saying that Wizard of the Crow is a very different kind of text that encourages very different responses and effects, despite its pedagogic quality and even its more hortatory moments. It refrains more assiduously and, I think, more successfully than any of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s other works from sanctioning, via some purportedly authoritative voice, any sort of official political doctrine or strategy.73 Of course the novel repeatedly endorses certain political ideas. The decidedly Leninist idea that the Movement should ‘insert’ its socialist ideas into the ‘spontaneous demonstrations’ of the queues (WC, 666), as we have seen, is one in the eye for anybody who thinks Ng˜ ug˜ı might have lost his faith in Marxism. And this is an unquestionably feminist novel, such is the centrality of women’s liberation to a movement for socialist transformation that is in fact, in this novel, led by women. There is also a pedagogical insistence on the importance of sexual health (WC, 91–2) and there are even frequent debates between Nyaw˜ıra and Kam˜ıt˜ı about the competing merits of the former’s militant insistence on class struggle and the latter’s effectively mystical belief that ‘[a]ll life is one’ (WC, 274) or between mass movements and the rights of the individual (WC, 129). If his feminism has always been a salient feature of his fiction (WC, 428), what McLaren calls the novel’s ‘eco-critical dimension’,74 its lyrical sketches of Africa’s fauna

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and complex ecosystems and its concerns about deforestation and climate change, is something of a departure in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work (WC, 201).75 But this is by no means a roman à thèse, for a politics of liberation like Ng˜ ug˜ı’s also implies a similarly unregimented experience of reading in which answers, solutions and ultimately even courses of action are the result of independent thought and discussion and certainly not of preconceived answers and solutions imposed or endorsed, as it were, by the novelist-dictator himself or by some unimpeachable voice within the text. It is a text that encourages relatively unregimented acts of reading and interpretation rather than the servile acquiescence in authority presumed by Stanley’s hagiography. It is no accident that Wizard of the Crow is preoccupied with the detection and interpretation of crime. Ultimately, these are activities that the novel invites from its readers not something that any character or authorial voice endeavours to do on readers’ behalf. Granted, some of the events of the novel are narrated in the ebullient voice of the policeman and garrulous storyteller Constable and later Superintendent Arigaigai Gathere or AG. But it is the novel’s anonymous main narrator not AG who appears to be a kind of detective trying to piece together a coherent account of events from the numerous and conflicting as well as ‘ceaselessly transforming’ (WC, 570) ‘sources’ (WC, 469) that have come into his hands. Indeed the labour of tracing the many crimes and misdemeanours in the novel to their perpetrators and of ensuring that justice is done is ultimately the reader’s—or rather, the readers’—responsibility. As Tzvetan Todorov has shown in his structuralist account of crime fiction, the novel about crime has two narratives: ‘the story of the crime and the story of the investigation’.76 It is the purpose of the latter to uncover the former, to trace the ‘misdeed’ that as Ernst Bloch points out usually precedes the beginning of the main narrative and the bringing to light of which is crime fiction’s ultimate theme.77 Interpretation is central to the crime novel and in particular to detective fiction. Indeed many critics, from the Marxist perspective of Bloch and Ernest Mandel or the more Foucauldian one of D.A. Miller,78 have perceived in the detective’s decipherment of the criminal act, in his successful identification of the criminal and in the consequent punishment imposed by the judicial system crime fiction’s predominantly disciplinary function. Put differently, crime fiction dramatises social conflicts and resolves them imaginatively by reasserting the inevitability of justice and the validity of the law. In classic detective fiction, according to Mandel, ‘the “battle of wits”… unfolds

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simultaneously at two levels: between the great detective and the criminal, and between the author and the reader’79 ; the result of the battle, however, is foreordained since the author ought to outwit the reader by keeping from him or her the secret of the crime’s perpetrator while the state, personified by the detective, ought to outwit the criminal by enforcing the power of law and legitimate authority. What Wizard of the Crow succeeds in doing, by contrast, is to perform power in such a way as to unveil the state itself as the principal miscreant. Abur˜ıria is a state in which justice is not inevitable and the law is invalid. Fredric Jameson has shown how the ultimate objective or at least effect of the radical detective novel and conspiracy film is not to uncover and make known or correct isolated acts of corruption or wrongdoing but rather to trace particular misdeeds to their true source in a whole society (or in Wizard of the Crow’s case a global colonial or neocolonial system) that is corrupt and unjust. Here the detective is a medium of ‘cognitive mapping’, to use Jameson’s useful phrase, not an agent of state surveillance. His investigation of the crime ‘becomes the occasion for the indictment of a whole collectivity’80 ; ‘society as a whole is the mystery to be solved’.81 The detective or ordinary citizen-investigator thus becomes an individual subject endowed, in Jameson’s words, ‘with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system’.82 He or she is then either overwhelmed by the magnitude of this revelation and succumbs to cynicism and resignation or else he too falls victim to the regime’s violence, thus confirming and accentuating his insight into the state’s criminality for the reader. In such denouements, the inability of mere works of art to correct this state of affairs is declared and the task of practical opposition is bequeathed to the novels’ readers. André Brink’s A Dry White Season (1979), Nuruddin Farah’s Sweet and Sour Milk (1979) and Ng˜ ug˜ı’s own Petals of Blood (1977) are examples of this kind of novel. Therefore the knowledge provided by Wizard of the Crow is not knowledge of the criminality of isolated malefactors whose deeds can then simply be reproved or chastised but knowledge of the criminality of the system of dictatorship itself. It is knowledge that the Ruler of Abur˜ıria is also the puppet of the Global Bank as well as the product of all the colonial and neocolonial forces that have placed and sustained him in power. What the reader, like Kam˜ıt˜ı, is encouraged to develop, on an even bigger scale, is an aptitude for ‘making connections’ between particular ‘woes and those of the community at large’ (WC, 61). Wizard of the Crow enacts what Mandel would call a breach in crime fiction’s ‘integrative

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function’. Mandel tells us that with the increasingly obvious association between police, informers and criminals, with the penetration of big business by organised crime (as well as the use by business of criminal methods), and with the growing symbiosis between business, crime and the state, the old moral oppositions between a ‘good’ state and its ‘bad’ criminal adversaries became untenable: ‘the established order itself gradually became more and more ambiguous, more and more closely identified with shady methods, corruption, compromises on basic values’.83 Bertolt Brecht, of course, ventured a similar insight when he famously asked: what is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of one? What, Ng˜ ug˜ı enquires in similar vein, is rebellion against the state compared to the larceny and murder perpetrated by the real criminals in high office? Wizard of the Crow therefore works to disrupt what Stephen Knight’s important study of the genre shows to be the ideological function of crime fiction and thus lines up alongside those African-American writers and feminist approaches that have disrupted the conservative expectations and norms of the genre.84 In classic crime fiction, as Caroline Reitz has shown, the colonised parts of the globe appear as exotic settings and as places in which colonial authority must be exerted against the threat of disorder and illegality.85 A characteristically postcolonial riposte to this way of writing and thinking is to turn the conventional definitions of criminality, justice and guilt on their heads: ‘the social order is no longer restored, but questioned through alternative notions of justice’.86 The identification of colonialism as a grievous crime is therefore one of the signal motifs of anti-colonial writing. ‘For centuries’, in Fanon’s unflinching verdict, ‘the capitalists have behaved in the under-developed world like nothing more than war criminals’ (WoE, 80). One of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s achievements in Wizard of the Crow is to make available the kind of connections that reveal colonialism and its neocolonial manifestations to be the very epitome of criminality and that show justice to necessitate resistance to that power not its assertion or endorsement.87 It goes without saying that this crime is extraordinarily difficult to punish or rectify. ‘All that intellectuals can do’ in such circumstances, according to Josef Gugler, is ‘to expose tyranny, to erode support for ug˜ı’s novel points to the tyranny, to deprive tyranny of legitimacy’.88 Ng˜ nakedness of Abur˜ıria’s new ‘Emperor’. Even the Wizard, whether that role is being played by Kam˜ıt˜ı or the much more militant Nyaw˜ıra, does not instruct his clients or prescribe cures but rather, in the form of parables, trials and questions, he invites them to think through and diagnose

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their own problems before taking independent action to rectify them.89 These reasonably priced sessions with the Wizard are also extremely inclusive, since Nyaw˜ıra and Kam˜ıt˜ı ‘were mindful never to turn people with no money away’ (WC, 274). ‘The most potent is the magic within you’ (WC, 306), the Wizard tells Vinjinia. Both the healing of the self and the healing of the state, like the attainment of the kingdom of God for Luke’s gospel (Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work as ever being a rich storehouse of quotations and allusions from the Bible, which Gikandi reminds us is effectively ‘the Ur-text of African-language written literature’90 ), are the results of freely undertaken action. This practice of provoking thought and participation is all at once a quality of texts, a form of political activism and a model of democratic empowerment, which is why ‘the powers of the Wizard of the Crow’, both the character and the novel, are such ‘a threat to [the Ruler’s] perceived omnipotence’ (WC, 561). So when, to the Ruler’s consternation, the long-absent Wizard of the Crow addresses the People’s Assembly live on national television to tell them ‘the story of his travels in time and space’ he does so not to issue edicts but to relate ‘a rather long parable of how humans surrendered control of their own lives to a blind deity with a double-barreled name of M&M, or money and market’, a parable related not by a deity of course but by a veritable trickster or provocateur, here to needle and inflame rather than reassure, to pose questions and eschew all facile answers. Why did Africa let Europe cart away millions of Africa’s souls from the continent to the four corners of the wind? How could Europe lord it over a continent ten times its size? Why does needy Africa continue to let its wealth meet the needs of those outside its borders and then follow behind with hands outstretched for a loan of the very wealth it let go? How did we arrive at this, that the best leader is the one who knows how to beg for a share of what he has already given away at the price of a broken tool? Where is the future of Africa? I cried… What kind of tomorrow was Abur˜ıria pregnant with? Of unity or murderous divisions? Of cries or laughter? Our tomorrow is determined by what we do today. Our fate is our hands. (WC, 681)

The Wizard’s radical oration is replete with questions, glimpsed possibilities, and carefully formulated choices and alternatives for his (or rather her, since it is now Nyaw˜ıra playing the role) audience to ponder and figure out. The speech serves to encapsulate the method and the moral of the whole novel, being didactic but not prescriptive, stressing the sheer

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scale and longevity of the system it seeks to expose and lampoon without allowing itself to succumb to despair, and insistent (indeed reliant) on the intelligence and the capacity for independent political action of its various audiences.

Notes 1. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Wizard of the Crow, trans. by the author, London: Harvill Secker, 2006. Quotations are given in the text after WC. Ahmadou Kourouma, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Vintage, 2004. Quotations are given in the text after WWBV . 2. Josaphat B. Kubayanda, ‘Unfinished Business: Dictatorial Literature of Post-Independence Latin America and Africa’, Research in African Literatures, 28:4 (1997), 38–53 (p. 51). 3. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998, p. 25. Subsequent references are given in the main text after PGD. 4. Emmanuel Yewah, ‘Political Rhetoric in/and the African Text’, Research in African Literatures, 21:2 (1990), 67–78. 5. Roberto González Echeverría, The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985, pp. 64–85. 6. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Second edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983. 7. Marjorie Agosin, ‘Inhabitants of Decayed Palaces: The Dictator in the Latin American Novel’, Human Rights Quarterly, 12 (1990), 328–335 (p. 331). 8. Incidentally the Ruler also calls non-African tyrants to mind. During the Cold War he was celebrated in the West, like Indonesia’s Suharto, as ‘a bulwark against communism’ for massacring a million communists in less than a month (WC, 234). Not only Africa of course, which is this book’s main concern, and Latin America but also much of Asia has been forcefed neoliberalism’s poisonous remedies. John Pilger argues that ‘Globalisation in Asia Was Conceived in Indonesia’s Bloodbath’, The New Rulers of the World, London: Verso, 2002, p. 30. The US-backed military coup of 1965–66, which resulted in the murder of up to a million Indonesian communists and other radicals, led not only to the ‘corporate takeover’ (39) by Western multinationals of the country’s timber and minerals and the immiseration of its workers in ‘export processing zones’ but also to the dubious ministrations of the World Bank, to a lucrative new market for Western-manufactured weapons and to the longed-for overthrow of

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9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24.

25.

the previous regime with its commitment to anti-colonialism and nonalignment. Indonesia thus became, in the words of the World Bank, neoliberalism’s ‘model pupil’. Nuruddin Farah, Close Sesame, Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1992, p. 234. On Farah’s extraordinary trilogy see especially Derek Wright, ‘Somali Powerscapes: Mapping Farah’s Fiction’, Research in African Literatures, 21:2 (1999), 21–34. Wole Soyinka, ‘Kongi’s Harvest’, Collected Plays, vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, p. 62. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 18. Ken Hirschkop, Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, p. 6, emphasis in the original. Augusto Roa Bastos, I the Supreme, trans. Helen Lane, New York: Dalkey Archive Press, 2000 [1974], p. 59. Subsequent quotations are given in the main text after IS. The sclerosis and overthrow of dictatorships were among Kapu´scinski’s ´ principal themes. They are also explored in his account of the final years in power of the last Shah. Ryszard Kapu´scinski, ´ Shah of Shahs, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006 [1985]. Ryszard Kapu´scinski, ´ The Emperor, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006, p. 8. Gabriel García Márquez, The Autumn of the Patriarch, trans. Gregory Rabassa, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995 [1975], p. 163. Ibid., p. 294. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘In Memory of Eichendorff’, Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rold Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, New York: Columbia University Press, 1991, pp. 55–79 (p. 70). Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983, pp. 31–53. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Harvard University Press, 1975; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London: Routledge, 1990. Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations, New York: Columbia University press, 1991; Music at the Limits: Three Decades of Essays and Articles on Music, London: Bloomsbury, 2008. Said, Music at the Limits, p. 20, emphasis in the original. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Bach Defended Against His Devotees’, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983 [1967], pp. 133–146. Said, Music at the Limits, p. 20.

3

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36.

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Ibid., p. 56. Edward W. Said, On Late Style, London: Bloomsbury, 2007, p. 117. Said, Musical Elaborations, p. 20. Said, On Late Style, p. 84. Simon Gikandi, ‘Traveling Theory: Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Return to English’, Research in African Literatures, 31:2 (2000), 194–209 (p. 204). Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Oxford: James Currey, 1993, p. 71. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, A Grain of Wheat, London: Heinemann, 2008 [1967]. As Ng˜ ug˜ı describes it, one of the main aims of these projects was to involve the audience in as active a way as possible in the production of the play and in the development and interpretation of its meanings. It sounds like a veritably Brechtian affair in which habits and ideologies were broken down precisely by abolishing barriers between the audience and the action. ‘The stage and the auditorium – fixed long wooden seats arranged like stairs – were almost an extension of each other. It had no roof. It was an open air theatre with large empty spaces surrounding the stage and the auditorium. The flow of actors and people between the auditorium and the stage, and around the stage and the entire auditorium was uninhibited’. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, London: Heinemann, 1986, p. 42. Brecht’s epic theatre sought, similarly, to make spectators into performers via, in Walter Benjamin’s memorable phrase, ‘the filling-in of the orchestra pit’. Understanding Brecht, trans. Anna Bostock, London: Verso, 1998, p. 1. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, p. 33. ‘As an event that takes place in the public square, g˜ıcaand˜ı is not only a performance but a site of performance, providing a model for interpersonal and public discourse. Practically every g˜ıcaand˜ı performance concludes with the formula: Hau twacemania u˜ m˜ uu˜ th˜ı, no ho t˜ ugaacemania r˜ uu˜ ci˜ u. (We will meet again tomorrow in the same place we met today). Far from signifying changelessness, this formulaic line promises future encounters between performers in which new themes will be introduced and old ones re-examined. The public, let it not be forgotten, will be in attendance’. Gitahi G˜ıt˜ıt˜ı, ‘Recuperating a “Disappearing” Art Form: Resonances of “G˜ıcaand˜ı” in Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross ’, The World of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, ed. Charles Cantalupo, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1995, pp. 109–127 (p. 124). Lewis Nkosi, ‘Reading Matigari: The New Novel of Post-Independence’, The World of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, ed. Charles Cantalupo, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993, pp. 197–205 (p. 199).

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37. Robert L. Colson, ‘Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow’, Research in African Literatures, 42:1 (2011), 133–153 (p. 134). 38. Colson, ‘Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest’, p. 133. 39. Ibid., p. 135. 40. The novel weighs in at 1068 grams, according to William Slaymaker, ‘Digesting Crow: Reading and Teaching Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow’, Research in African Literatures, 42:4 (2011), 8–19 (p. 8). 41. Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London: Verso, 1981, p. 144. 42. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky, Indiana University Press, 1984, pp. 122–137. 43. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin, and John Costello, SJ, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977, p. 247. 44. Stephen Minta, Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia, London: Jonathan Cape, 1987, pp. 110–111. Raymond Leslie Williams has likewise argued that Márquez’s work should be characterised as modern rather than postmodern on account of its advocacy of notions of reason, truth and social progress. Raymond L. Williams, The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture, and the Crisis of Truth, London: Macmillan, 1997, p. 7. This is also Gerald Martin’s view, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century, London: Verso, 1989, pp. 237–293. 45. Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, trans. Gregory Rabassa, London: Picador, 1978 [1968], p. 17. 46. Gabriel García Márquez, ‘The Solitude of Latin America: Nobel Address, 1982’, Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings, ed. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell, trans. Richard Cardwell, Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 207–211. 47. Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989, p. 69. 48. Joseph McLaren, ‘From the National to the Global: Satirical Magic Realism in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow’, The Global South, 2:2 (2008), 150–158. 49. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana, 1992, pp. 245–255 (p. 252). 50. ‘Periodizing the 1960s’, p. 184. 51. Prashad, The Poorer Nations, p. 25. 52. Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All, London: Verso, 2013, p. 3.

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53. Godwin R. Murunga, ‘Governance and the Politics of Structural Adjustment in Kenya’, Kenya: The Struggle for Democracy, ed. Godwin R. Murunga and Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o, New York: Codresia Books in association with Zed Books, 2007, pp. 263–300 (p. 295); Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo, Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999; and Thandika Mkandawire and Charles C. Soludo, African Voices on Structural Adjustment, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. 54. Mark Curtis, Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World, London: Vintage, 2003, p. 332. 55. This is the thesis of Colin Leys’ classic study of Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of Neo-Colonialism, 1964–1971, London: Heinemann, 1975. 56. Murunga, ‘Governance and the Politics of structural Adjustment in Kenya’, pp. 267–268. 57. Murunga, ‘Governance and the Politics of structural Adjustment in Kenya’, p. 278. See also Stephen Brown, ‘Authoritarian Leaders and Multiparty Elections in Africa: How Foreign Donors Help to Keep Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi in Power’, Third World Quarterly, 22.5 (2001), 725–739. 58. Michela Wrong, It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower, London: Fourth Estate, 2009. 59. Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization, p. 14. 60. Murunga, ‘Governance and the Politics of Structural Adjustment in Kenya’, p. 282. 61. See Joseph Takougang, ‘The 2002 Legislative Election in Cameroon: A Retrospective on Cameroon’s Stalled Democracy Movement’, Journal of Modern African Studies, 41:3 (2003), 421–435. 62. McLaren, ‘From the National to the Global: Satirical Magic Realism in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow’, p. 152. 63. Madhu Krishnan, Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications, London: Palgrave, 2014, p. 8. 64. Ibid., p. 10. 65. Richard K. Priebe, ‘Literature, Community, and Violence: Reading African Literature in the West, Post-9/11’, Research in African Literatures, 36:2 (2005), 46–58 (p. 48). 66. Ibid., p. 46. 67. See Patrick Williams, ‘“Like Wounded Birds”?: Ng˜ ug˜ı and the Intellectuals’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 207 (1997), 201–218 (p. 217). 68. Simon Gikandi, ‘The Postcolonial Wizard: A Review of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow’, Transition, 98 (2008), 156–169 (p. 165).

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69. Mike Kuria, ‘Speaking in Tongues: Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Gift to Workers and Peasants in m˜ urogi wa kagogo’, Journal of Literary Studies, 27:3 (2011), 56–73. 70. Ng˜ ug˜ı, Decolonising the Mind, p. 108. 71. Krishnan, Contemporary African Literature in English, p. 120. 72. See Williams, ‘“Like Wounded Birds”?’ p. 209. 73. We lovers of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work should not flinch from acknowledging some less than subtle political judgements. For example, his 1976 statement that one half of Korea was ‘under U.S. imperialism’ while ‘the other half has been liberated and is a people’s Korea’ was at best only half right. Nor should we ignore the way in which these at times unsubtle political positions have sometimes got in the way of what I have been characterising as the less controlled and more performative element in his writing. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Writers in Politics, London: Heinemann, 1981, p. 117. 74. McLaren, ‘From the National to the Global’, p. 155. 75. Brendon Nicholls has provided a very interesting account of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work’s consistent but not always, in his view, consistently convincing commitment to feminist representations. Women in the early fiction are often utilised as symbols of postcolonial nationhood, either as maternal signifiers of promise and futurity or as prostitutes and therefore signifiers of the nation’s violation and exploitation. Women in the later works, by contrast, are involved, in varied and complicated ways and by utilising a kind of insurgent political agency, in the active formation of an alternative future for the postcolonial nation state. Accordingly Wizard of the Crow is praised by Nicholls as ‘a very accomplished feminist novel’ since Nyaw˜ıra ‘does not settle down into a position that can be instrumentalized’. Brendon Nicholls, Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Reading, London: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 4 and 188. Ng˜ ug˜ı has been heavily criticised in the past for ‘instrumentalized’ depictions of women by, for example, Florence Stratton and Elleke Boehmer. The latter accuses Ng˜ ug˜ı’s work of identifying ‘national freedom with male freedom and an inherited state structure.’ Elleke Boehmer, ‘The Master’s Dance to the Master’s Voice: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Representation of Women in the Writing of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 26:1 (1991), 188–197 (p. 195). I think Patrick Williams’ more judicious assessment was closer to the truth when he argued, before the publication of Wizard of the Crow, that his ‘understanding of the structural nature of power would in fact appear to be one of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s stronger points, while its gendered dimension constitutes a growing awareness’. Williams, Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 105. Wizard of the Crow shows how that awareness has continued to develop. 76. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 44.

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77. Ernst Bloch, ‘A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel’, The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenbury, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996, pp. 245–264 (p. 249). 78. D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 79. Ernest Mandel, Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story, London: Pluto Press, 1984, p. 16. 80. Fredric Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992, p. 37. 81. Ibid., p. 39. 82. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991, p. 54. 83. Mandel, Delightful Murder, p. 122. 84. Stephen Knight, Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity, London: Palgrave, 2004, pp. 162–194. See also Knight, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, London: Macmillan, 1980; and ‘Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial: The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness’, Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, pp. 17–33. 85. Caroline Reitz, Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004. 86. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, ‘Introduction: The “Anatomy” of Crime Writing’, Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, ed. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006, pp. 1–16 (p. 5). 87. The contributors to Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen’s useful volume Postcolonial Postmortems show that what distinguishes postcolonial crime fiction is its willingness to call conventional definitions of criminality and justice into question and to place particular crimes in the context of the far greater and ongoing crime of imperialism itself. 88. Josef Gugler, ‘African Literary Comment on Dictators: Wole Soyinka’s Plays and Nuruddin Farah’s Novels’, The Journal of Modern African Studies, 26:1 (1988), 171–177 (p. 176). 89. Raphael Dalleo makes a similar point about the empowering pedagogy of the Wizard, though I cannot agree with him that this teaching method represents a ‘turning away’ from the ‘anticolonial’. Dalleo, ‘Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and Postcolonial Pedagogy’, Research in African Literatures, 43:2 (2012), 138–154 (p. 151). 90. Gikandi, ‘The Postcolonial Wizard’, p. 98.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W. [1967] 1983. “Bach Defended Against His Devotees.” Prisms. Trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 133–146. ———. 1991. “In Memory of Eichendorff.” Notes to Literature. Vol 1. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP, pp. 55–79. Agosin, Marjorie. 1990. “Inhabitants of Decayed Palaces: The Dictator in the Latin American Novel.” Human Rights Quarterly 12, 328–335. Austin, J.L. 1975. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. ———. 1984. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Benjamin, Walter. 1992. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, pp. 245–255. ———. 1998. Understanding Brecht. Trans. Anna Bostock. London: Verso. Boehmer, Elleke. 1991. “The Master’s Dance to the Master’s Voice: Revolutionary Nationalism and the Representation of Women in the Writing of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 26.1, 188–197. Bloch, Ernst. 1996. “A Philosophical View of the Detective Novel.” The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays. Trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenbury. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 245–264. Booth, Wayne C. 1983. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Second edition. Chicago: The U of Chicago P. Brennan, Timothy. 1989. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Brown, Stephen. 2001. “Authoritarian Leaders and Multiparty Elections in Africa: How Foreign Donors Help to Keep Kenya’s Daniel Arap Moi in Power.” Third World Quarterly 22.5, 725–739. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Colson, Robert L. 2011. “Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow.” Research in African Literatures 42.1, 133–153. Curtis, Mark. 2003. Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World. London: Vintage. Dalleo, Raphael. 2012. “Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow and Postcolonial Pedagogy.” Research in African Literatures 43.2, 138–154. Eagleton, Terry. 1981. Walter Benjamin, or, Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. London: Verso.

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Echeverría, Roberto González. 1985. The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature. Austin: U of Texas P. Farah, Nuruddin. 1992. Close Sesame. Saint Paul, Min: Graywolf Press. Gikandi, Simon. 2000. “Traveling Theory: Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Return to English.” Research in African Literatures 31.2, 194–209. ———. 2008. “The Postcolonial Wizard: A Review of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow.” Transition 98, 156–169. G˜ıt˜ıt˜ı, Gitahi. 1995. “Recuperating a ‘Disappearing’ Art Form: Resonances of ‘G˜ıcaand˜ı’ in Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross.” The World of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. Ed. Charles Cantalupo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 109– 127. Gugler, Josef. 1988. “African Literary Comment on Dictators: Wole Soyinka’s Plays and Nuruddin Farah’s Novels.” The Journal of Modern African Studies 26.1, 171–177. Hirschkop, Ken. 19999. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford UP. Jameson, Fredric. 1988. “Periodizing the 60s.” Ideologies of Theory—Essays, 1971–1986, vol. 2: The Syntax of History. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, pp. 178–208. ———. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. ———. 1992. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Kapu´scinski, ´ Ryszard. [1982] 2006. The Emperor. Trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. [1985] 2006. Shah of Shahs. Trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Krishnan, Madhu. 2014. Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications. London: Palgrave. Knight, Stephen. 1980. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan. ———. 2006. “Crimes Domestic and Crimes Colonial: The Role of Crime Fiction in Developing Postcolonial Consciousness.” Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Ed. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 17–33. ———. 2004. Crime Fiction, 1800–2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kourouma, Ahmadou. 2004. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote. Trans. Frank Wynne. London: Vintage. Kubayanda, Josaphat B. 1997. “Unfinished Business: Dictatorial Literature of Post-Independence Latin America and Africa.” Research in African Literatures 28.4, 38–53.

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Kuria, Mike. 2011. “Speaking in Tongues: Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Gift to Workers and Peasants in m˜ urogi wa kagogo.” Journal of Literary Studies 27.3, 56–73. Lapavitsas, Costas. 2013. Profiting Without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All. London: Verso. Leys, Colin. 1975. Underdevelopment in Kenya: The Political Economy of NeoColonialism, 1964–1971. London: Heinemann. Mandel, Ernest. 1984. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. London: Pluto Press. Márquez, Gabriel García. [1968] 1978. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. London: Picador. ———. [1975] 1995. The Autumn of the Patriarch. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1989. “The Solitude of Latin America: Nobel Address, 1982.” Trans. Richard Cardwell. Gabriel García Márquez: New Readings. Ed. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, pp. 207–211. Martin, Gerald. 1989. Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Matzke, Christine and Susanne Mühleisen. 2006. “Introduction: The ‘Anatomy’ of Crime Writing.” Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective. Ed. Christine Matzke and Susanne Mühleisen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 1–16. McLaren, Joseph. 2008. “From the National to the Global: Satirical Magic Realism in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow.” The Global South 2.2, 150–158. Miller, D.A. 1988. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P. Minta, Stephen. 1987. Gabriel García Márquez: Writer of Colombia. London: Jonathan Cape. Mkandawire, Thandika and Charles C. Soludo. 1999. African Voices on Structural Adjustment. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003. ———. 1999. Our Continent, Our Future: African Perspectives on Structural Adjustment. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Murunga, Godwin R. 2007. “Governance and the Politics of Structural Adjustment in Kenya.” Kenya: The Struggle for Democracy. Ed. Godwin R. Murunga and Shadrack Wanjala Nasong’o. New York: Codresia Books in association with Zed Books, pp. 263–300. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. [1967] 2008. A Grain of Wheat. London: Heinemann. ———. 1981. Writers in Politics. London: Heinemann. ———. 1986. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: Heinemann. ———. 1993. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms. Oxford: James Currey. ———. 1998. Penpoints, Gunpoints, and Dreams: Towards a Critical Theory of the Arts and the State in Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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———. 2006. Wizard of the Crow. Trans. by the author. London: Harvill Secker. Nicholls, Brendon. 2010. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Gender, and the Ethics of Reading. London: Ashgate. Nkosi, Lewis. “Reading Matigari: The New Novel of Post-Independence.” The World of Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. Ed. Charles Cantalupo. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, pp. 197–205. Pilger, John. 2002. The New Rulers of the World. London: Verso. Prashad, Vijay. 2014. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London: Verso. Priebe, Richard K. 2005. “Literature, Community, and Violence: Reading African Literature in the West, Post-9/11.” Research in African Literatures 36.2, 46–58. Reitz, Caroline. 2004. Detecting the Nation: Fictions of Detection and the Imperial Venture. Columbus: Ohio State UP. Ricoeur, Paul. 1977. The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. Trans. Robert Czerny, Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Roa Bastos, Augusto. [1974] 2000. I the Supreme. Trans. Helen Lane. New York: Dalkey Archive Press. Said, Edward W. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, pp. 31–53. ———. 1991. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia UP. ———. 2007. On Late Style. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2008. Music at the Limits: Three Decades of Essays and Articles on Music. London: Bloomsbury. Slaymaker, William. 2011. “Digesting Crow: Reading and Teaching Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow.” Research in African Literatures 42.4, 8–19. Soyinka, Wole. 1974. “Kongi’s Harvest.” Collected Plays. Vol. 2. Oxford: Oxford UP. Takougang, Joseph. 2003. “The 2002 Legislative Election in Cameroon: A Retrospective on Cameroon’s Stalled Democracy Movement.” Journal of Modern African Studies 41.3, 421–435. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1977. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Yewah, Emmanuel. 1990. “Political Rhetoric in/and the African Text.” Research in African Literatures 21.2, 67–78. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1995. Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization. London: Verso. Williams, Patrick. 1997. “‘Like Wounded Birds’? Ng˜ ug˜ı and the Intellectuals.” The Yearbook of English Studies 207, 201–218. ———. 1999. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. Manchester: Manchester UP.

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Williams, Raymond L. 1997. The Postmodern Novel in Latin America: Politics, Culture, and the Crisis of Truth. London: Macmillan. Wright, Derek. 1999. “Somali Powerscapes: Mapping Farah’s Fiction.” Research in African Literatures 21.2, 21–34. Wrong, Michela. 2009. It’s Our Turn to Eat: The Story of a Kenyan Whistle Blower. London: Fourth Estate.

CHAPTER 4

Performance and Power II: Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote

According to Jean Ouédraogo, the ‘ambition’ of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is ‘to speak of the Cold War and its ravages in Africa’.1 My argument is that the preoccupation with the Cold War in Kourouma’s oeuvre should be seen instead chiefly as a way to address the larger and longer context in which Cold War rhetoric was used to license the continuing depredations of imperialism in postcolonial Africa and therefore the maintenance in power of authoritarian regimes.2 Whether a regime presents itself as ‘anti-communist’ or latterly as democratic, the important thing is that it is content to use its powers to perpetuate Africa’s peripheral role in the world-system. The Cold War should be seen therefore as an instance of as well as an episode in that longer and ongoing history. Kourouma’s oeuvre is, then, a protracted examination, in all of his novels, of the various techniques and ruses employed by postcolonial African regimes to shore up their power. In Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, the provisional title of which was The Cold War,3 ‘anti-communist’ propaganda is portrayed as a mere camouflage for the inexorable rule over the République du Golfe by Koyaga, the ‘Supreme Guide’, ‘Founder President and President for Life’ (WWBV , 340), and his French and American patrons. The new title refers to the dictator’s belief that in the event that he should be in danger of losing an election the beasts would provide him with a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2_4

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majority, a satire of course on the hunter-dictator’s grandiose delusions but also on the brazenness and guile with which figures like the obvious model for Koyaga, Togo’s Gnassingbé Eyadéma, managed to ride out the democratising wave of the 1990s. Even after thirty years Koyaga’s power (like Eyadéma’s until his death in 2005) remains invulnerable, despite the end of the Cold War and despite the national conference that the wily Eyadéma, like his fictional avatar, convened in response to strikes and anti-government protests in 1991 and then subsequently outmanoeuvred. Authoritarian state sovereignty in postcolonial Africa is so interminable and apparently so magically indomitable that even ‘democratisation’ becomes a mere chapter in its enduring sway. Independence (after which the dictatorial state continues to ally itself with the West) and ‘democratisation’ (similarly undertaken or at least feigned at the behest of the former colonial powers) are both presented by Kourouma, to quote a phrase from his Allah Is Not Obliged, as ‘a change to the changes that doesn’t change anything’.4 This chapter therefore rejects the Cold War lens that is usually employed to look at African history during the two decades or so after independence. It sees the period instead as an attempt by the former colonial (and now neo-colonial) powers to foil the radical political and above all economic innovations made possible by independence. That is not to say that I think the rivalries of the Cold War played no part in African history during the struggle for independence and after. Indeed, though I disagree for a number of reasons with his book’s main premise that the Russian and Chinese communist regimes had fundamentally different objectives (the one possessing in his view a Marxist emphasis on class and the other a more anti-colonial emphasis on nationalism), I suspect Jeremy Friedman is on to something when he suggests that the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s and the consequent ‘competition for the Third World’ were the main means by which newly decolonised states shaped the revolutionary agenda of the global Left—securing investment, military assistance and ideological support, in addition to (often pretty dogmatic and unhelpful) political and economic advice.5 Ultimately, however, I think that scholars of postcolonial Africa during this period need to lay emphasis not on the relationship between newly decolonised states and the second world but on that between decolonised states and the first world and on the rather hotter political and economic and often even military war that the first world insisted on waging against the prospects for meaningful decolonisation in Africa.

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NSC-68, which Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin describe as the US National Security Council’s ‘master document on the strategy of containment’ written in 1950, declared that the ‘overall policy at the present time may be described as one designed to foster a world environment in which the American system can survive and flourish… a policy which we would probably pursue even if there were no Soviet threat’.6 The ‘containment’ of the ‘Soviet threat’ thereafter became an excuse or an alibi for American rearmament at the time of the Korean War. ‘Containment’ was also a euphemism and a pretext for the concerted suppression of any and every attempt on the part of the peoples of the colonised world to redress what in 1947 the so-called architect of ‘containment’ George Kennan, the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, called the ‘disparity’ between the United States’ relatively small population and its gigantic share of the world’s wealth. In pursuit of that endeavour, Kennan went on, ‘we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation’, all of which were to be viewed henceforth as ‘unreal objectives’.7 It follows that the United States’ support for anti-colonial liberation after the war was at best rhetorical and conditional, a commitment that was in practice abandoned whenever the interests of US capital (and of the broader world-capitalist system over which the United States now presided) were in danger of being undermined. The US commitment to [anticolonial] movements was real only in so far as national liberation, self-determination, or independence implied access for US capital and political influence, but it served the vital ideological purpose of allowing apologists for US globalism to align themselves with anticolonialists against Europe… Imperialism was rendered an historic oddity in the self-fulfilling language of universal democracy. Of course, from Guatemala to Iran, Cuba to Vietnam, where such access for US capital and political influence was not forthcoming, or energetically blocked, any commitment to democracy or rights of self-determination was easily discarded in favor of military force.8

In Giovanni Arrighi’s words, the ‘full sovereignty of Third World states constituted a latent and growing challenge to US world power, potentially far more serious than Soviet power itself’ (LTC, 332). Infinitely more dangerous to US interests than the modest foreign policy ambitions of Soviet bureaucrats was the prospect that the newly independent

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third world might form a unified bloc controlling most of the world’s primary commodities.9 As we shall see, critics have addressed the ways in which Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote explores the power of fetishism in the shape of Koyaga’s obsession with magic and his belief that fetish objects have made him invulnerable to assassination. But the fetishism of power is the novel’s most prominent theme. Readers learn a great deal about Koyaga’s personality cult, which is on a par with (indeed, is virtually indistinguishable from) the well-nigh Orwellian dimensions of Eyadéma’s. The latter consisted, as the cultural anthropologist Charles Piot reminds us, of ubiquitous portraits, an attendant troupe of dancing ‘animators’, a ‘fetishized and fictionalized’ biography of miraculously foiled assassination attempts and deliberately cultivated rumours about the protecting graces of powerful deities.10 The veritably occult character of the regime is to be found above all in its seemingly magical and fetishised fixedness, in a kind of amazing and preternatural indestructability that is manifested not only in the dictator’s fabled imperviousness to coups d’état but in the deplorable continuities of a system of authoritarian rule that has survived uninterrupted and in all important respects substantially unchanged from the original conquest by France, through the nominal transitions to independence, the Cold War and the long years of despotism and even since the apparent transition to multiparty democracy. In short, the state is presented by Kourouma’s novel as an undying Leviathan that terrorises its subjects. The state’s disturbing resemblance to its murderous colonial predecessor is revealed most tellingly by the language or idiom with which the state sees and presents itself. What we ascertain by these means is that since its inception the state has successively approached its subjects as a collection of savages to be disciplined by la mission civilisatrice, to be chastised and distracted by the postcolonial state’s extravagant performances of invulnerability, and latterly to be swindled and coerced by the vampire state of the post-Cold War era. The purpose of this apparently indomitable device for oppression and plunder has certainly not been to ‘contain’ the ‘Soviet threat’ but in fact repeatedly to ‘contain’ something that is infinitely more dangerous to the regime and its patrons: the bêtes sauvages who perennially threaten to overpower the predatory state in a genuine democratic transformation.

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Rupture or Continuity? There is a tension, then, between the novel’s implicit claim that authoritarian power is a durable and as yet unconquered reality in postcolonial Togo (and, since the novel is an allegory, in many other postcolonial African states) and the view set out in Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa After the Cold War, Piot’s important book on Togo after the Cold War, that states in West Africa and especially in the Gulf of Guinea succumbed in the 1990s to a process of ‘rupture’ and ‘decentring’. Piot begins by arguing, correctly, that the postcolonial state in Togo was at first practically indistinguishable from the despotic colonial state that it nominally replaced: it was an authoritarian entity, basically a proxy that was maintained by the financial and military support of France and the United States and that ruled localities through hand-picked chiefs (NF , 5). Eyadéma’s regime was bankrolled by Western allies, it suppressed political opposition through violence and patronage, and it impoverished the majority of the population while enriching the dictator and his entourage. The regime purchased support through an elaborate system of patrimony and flaunted its power through a strenuous personality cult and the official celebration of ‘tradition’. This situation came to an end in the 1990s, Piot contends, with a wave of anti-government protests in addition to the conclusion of the Cold War and the withdrawal of French and US patronage. While these events did not, alas, lead to its downfall, the far-reaching propaganda apparatus of the Eyadéma regime was nonetheless substantially dismantled. There was a nominal transition to multiparty democracy and, at least according to Piot, a general transformation and diminution of state power. But is Piot correct to state that older forms of imperialist exploitation were ‘replaced by postnational governmentality’ at this time? And was the Togolese state really circumscribed in a radical transition away from older colonial systems of dominance? Piot leans heavily on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s, to put it mildly, disputable claim in their Empire that in recent decades imperialism has ceded the field to a new ‘ruptured’ and decentred or even ‘rhizomic’ form of power. He argues that Togo and many other postcolonial African states are undergoing ‘significant shifts in modes of sovereignty and forms of political-economic organization’ away from state authoritarianism and towards a ‘fragmented/pluralized/privatized sovereignty’ (NF , 13). It is of course true that the political and economic changes in Togo since the end of the Cold War have been profound. After bankrolling the regime

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during the Cold War the United States and the EU drastically cut aid to Togo in the early 1990s. World Bank and IMF-imposed austerity, which of course was first unleashed before the end of the Cold War, led to the privatisation of state-owned land and institutions, massive hikes in the prices of everyday commodities and the devastation of essential social services, while the sharp devaluation of the CFA franc in 1994 doubled the national debt (NF , 31). The Togolese state ‘became a shadow of its former self’ (NF , 3), reduced to the status of a highly armed Mafioso, its social and developmental functions now performed as Piot persuasively shows mainly by NGOs and Pentecostal churches. The contrasting view presented by the novel, however, is that the continuities in Togo since the 1990s are far more significant than the discontinuities. I think we should be extremely wary of Hardt and Negri’s specious assertion that at some vaguely defined point in the last thirty years the ‘smooth space’ of ‘Empire’ somehow took the place of authoritarian state sovereignties in addition to the world economy’s former inequality and unevenness. Arrighi instantly refutes this claim by pointing to the persistent income gap between the Global North and South as measured by GNP per capita. That gap, he shows, is clearly not being closed by the limited mobility of labour from South to North (grotesquely exaggerated and even celebrated by Empire’s ecstatic rhetoric about the ‘multitude’) or by the even more limited mobility of capital in the other direction: ‘the road to global citizenship and to a guaranteed income for all citizens may be far longer, bumpier and more treacherous than Hardt and Negri would like us to believe’.11 Ellen Meiksins Wood is similarly sceptical about their claim that state sovereignties are in the process of being dissolved by the itinerant energies of capital and migrant labour. Global capital still requires nation states ‘to perform the necessary administrative and coercive functions’, including freeing up the movement of capital while preventing the free movement of labour.12 A truly revolutionary rupture in postcolonial Togo would involve substantive transformations of social and economic inequality, of political institutions and of the essentially corrupt relationship between the regime and international capital. Needless to say, these things have not yet transpired. Alas, neither imperialism nor its indispensable conduit, the authoritarian postcolonial state, have yet been definitively decentred or transcended, however ardently we might wish this to be the case and however profound have been the expedient modifications of both imperialist and state power in Togo and elsewhere since the early 1990s. Piot’s own brilliantly shrewd

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and exhaustive account of the unremittingly predatory nature of the postCold War Togolese state contradicts his Empire-like thesis that the state has somehow been emptied out and that this transformation demonstrates a larger global process whereby imperialism is being transcended and state sovereignties ‘decentred’. In Kourouma’s novel the Togolese state has certainly not yet ‘withered’ (NF , 19) in the Marxist sense of disbursing its functions to a democratically empowered populace.13 The elections that Eyadéma called after the national convention of 1991 were won with 96% of the vote after an opposition boycott. The subsequent elections in 1998 were blatantly fixed, since when there have been several further cases of vote-rigging and the manipulation of electoral law. It is difficult to see why Piot characterises the 1990s in Togo and elsewhere in West Africa as a moment of radical rupture when in his next breath he laments ‘the de facto continuation of the dictatorship’ (NF , 33). Even after Eyadéma’s death in 2005 his family remain in power and the country is still dominated by a corrupt political class. The massive anti-government protests of the early 1990s and the ‘liberalization’ of the country’s cultural life did not change the fact, which Kourouma’s novel insists on most vehemently, that whatever expedient adjustments it has undergone state power, not just in Togo but in the rest of postcolonial Africa, still awaits a truly fundamental democratic transformation. With the slashing of French and United States aid the Togolese state was changed almost overnight from a predatory entity capable of disbursing patronage into a predatory entity less capable than before of disbursing patronage, a significant change of course but not a fundamental one. Renewing its connections with French business interests in Lomé, as Piot’s own account shows, the state traded ‘state protection and tax-free standing for kickbacks’ (NF , 34); it became a hub for the global trade in arms and drugs; and both high- and low-level state functionaries, the latter because they had in many cases stopped being paid, contrived a myriad of ingenious schemes for fleecing the populace. Piot also points to the ‘remilitarization’ of the state in this period (NF , 36). The United States was quick to lend its support to Gnassingbé no. 2, despite his doubtful electoral legitimacy, and since the foundation of the United States African Command (AFRICOM) in 2007 it has taken a particular interest in the ‘stability’ of dubious regimes in oil-rich West Africa.14 In Piot’s own words, the attitude of the ‘international community’ to West Africa ‘bears similarity to its orientation during the Cold War era’

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(NF , 48). Amidst an unending economic crisis, the state in Togo did not so much ‘reinvent’ itself (NF , 34) therefore, as retrench itself or pare itself back to its essential and unconcealed function: predation, on behalf of its functionaries and foreign patrons. This is a process described by Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou as ‘the criminalization of the state in Africa’.15 Truly, ‘decentred’ is the last word I would use to describe this state of affairs. Kourouma’s novel’s stress on the well-nigh magical durability of the dictatorial state might best be appreciated by recalling that according to Piot the late dictator’s son, Faure Gnassingbé, when he assumed office on his father’s death in 2005 ‘flew around the continent in his father’s jet to solicit “advice” from other heads of state – Qadhafi, Bongo, Obasanjo, Kufuor, Campaoré’ (NF , 45), life imitating the art of a novel published several years previously and which at length describes Koyaga’s tour of ‘freedom-butchering Africa’ to learn ‘the perilous science of dictatorship from the masters of autocracy’ (WWBV , 208). What the novel reveals to be at stake in contemporary political struggles is not what Hardt and Negri erroneously call ‘the novelty of the structures and logics of power that order the contemporary world’ but, to the contrary, the extremely galling familiarity of those structures and logics.16 As Ndongo Samba Sylla shows in his discussion of the myth of ‘emerging Africa’, whatever economic progress was seen during the much-trumpeted new era of multiparty democracy in the 2000s was due not to the ‘reforms’ of structural adjustment but largely to the relatively high prices for commodities on the global market in the years before the 2008 crash. That growth failed to create enough decent jobs and tended to favour both foreign investors and ‘members of Africa’s politico-economic elites… Emergence rhetoric tends… to camouflage the unprecedented scale of the phenomenon of accumulation by dispossession experienced by most of the continent’.17 African economies remain deprived of real economic sovereignty, dependent as ever on foreign capital and foreign markets, and vulnerable still to fluctuations in commodity prices. Ray Bush shows how what he calls the ubiquitous ‘Africa rising trope’ is closely linked to mostly Western investment interests that reinforce sub-Saharan Africa’s role as an extractive economy (a source of primary products) instead of exploring forms of political democratisation and economic redistribution that might enable value to be retained in the continent.18 The facile ‘Africa rising’ trope, exemplified by the cover stories in The Economist and Time in 2011 and 2012

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respectively, forgets that ‘a region blighted by corruption, piracy, poverty and disease’ in the words of The Economist is in fact a region primarily blighted by its subordinate role in a global political economy that extracts the continent’s wealth and in which growth remains detached from development. The perennial debates about ‘pessimism’ and ‘optimism’ in the African context, about whether it is the ‘hopeful continent’ (as The Economist averred in 2011) or the ‘hopeless continent’ (as the same periodical concluded back in 2000), have little meaning apart from the essential question of whether its peoples are able to detach themselves from this system.

A Poem in Praise of the Dictator Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote should therefore be read, like Wizard of the Crow, as a text that encourages attention to the relentlessly authoritarian character of political power in what it presents as ‘by far the continent richest in poverty and dictators’ (WWBV , 440). ‘Richest’ is a strangely inapposite word to use in this context, or at least it appears to be until one recalls that the form of this text is a profoundly ironical donsomana or praise poem, a Malinké hunters’ ritual the ostensible or official purpose of which is to renew and prolong the dictator’s power in the presence of his fellow hunters and dictators. For the novel is narrated in a language of sustained and sweeping hyperbole. It is a kind of irreverently ingenuous history of ‘measureless Africa, a land as rich in tyrants as it is in pachiderms’ [la vaste Afrique, terre aussi riche en potentats qu’en pachydermes ] (WWBV , 315) or, further on, ‘a land as rich in violators of human rights as it is in hyenas’ (WWBV , 320), ‘a land as rich in shameless lying heads of state as it is in vultures’ (WWBV , 335) and ‘a land as rich in kleptomaniac dictators as it is in tragedies’ (WWBV , 355). These expressive refrains are something like a cross between the windy banalities of official oratory and the patronising clichés of commercial travel writing. They manage to subvert the belittling preconceptions of conventional discourse about ‘Africa’, with its dehumanising tourist’s-eye fixation with landscapes and wildlife, presenting Africa instead as a continent rich in the predatory fauna of tyrants who have devoured its wealth. The donsomana is a ritual of catharsis and purification narrated mainly by Bingo, a sora or hunter’s griot, and by Bingo’s ‘apprentice’ and ‘responder’ Tiécoura (WWBV , 2), with occasional interjections by

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Koyaga himself. Together they relate the convoluted story of the dictator’s rise to power in order to help him, after a reign of three decades, to relocate the two fetishes that are the source of his strength and of his celebrated invulnerability to assassination: his mother’s aerolite and the marabout’s Qur’an (WWBV , 67). Bingo comes not to bury Caesar but to praise him: ‘A sora is a teller of tales, one who relates the stories of the hunters to spur their heroes to greater feats’ (WWBV , 2). Bingo also chronicles the careers of Koyaga’s éminence grise Macledio and of the tyrants whom Koyaga visits in pursuit of advice and support and who compete for his potent fetishes whenever he appears to be in danger. The novel is divided into six ‘vigils’ or veillées, which are further subdivided into numbered sections (of which there are twenty-four in all), each of which concludes with three or more proverbs. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is not a work that explicitly denounces dictatorship but one whose ostensible or official purpose is to celebrate dictatorship. The donsomana resembles the events organised by the ‘taskforces’ and ‘hit squads’ [groupes de choc] of the League of Revolutionary Youth ‘during which they try to outdo each other in singing the praises, the Hymns to the Glory [hymnes en honneur] of the Supreme Guide’ (WWBV , 341). The donsomana also requires, indeed potentially fosters, alert readers capable of detecting the irony in the novel’s protracted paean of praise, and proficient therefore at deciphering and seeing through the official narratives and myths of Koyaga’s rule’s ‘permanence’ (WWBV , 330) and invulnerability that Bingo so vividly performs. Here the griot is far more than just a praise-singer, which according to Thomas A. Hale’s ‘Job Description for Griots’ is in any case ‘far too limited a descriptor for the profession when viewed in the regional context’ of the Sahel and Sudanian Savanna regions of West Africa.19 At various times this extremely ‘dynamic profession’ might involve services to the powerful including diplomacy, translation, the issuing of orders and the exhortation of warriors, as well as the composition of songs and music, the reporting of news, the provision of advice and the passing on of knowledge. My claim is that by appearing to sing the dictator’s praises Bingo and his responder in fact discharge functions that are much more pedagogical and even tacitly subversive in nature. What appears to be a narrative told on behalf of the powerful is so intensely hyperbolic and so manifestly partial that it might be received and understood by its auditors in radically different ways. The novel, in short, performs dictatorship in order to

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produce the kind of readers and citizens required to denounce dictatorship and instate more democratic forms of political rule. In particular, in what is an intensely cadent or rhythmic novel that resounds with recurring themes and expressions across its highly structured parts, it is the brazen and exceptionable permanence of dictatorship, despite and even because of the advent of ‘democratisation’, that is being insistently performed and therefore made available for scrutiny by Koyaga’s ostensibly loyal griot. In the first vigil Bingo’s ‘responder’ Tiécoura, ‘the fool, the idiot, the loon’ [le bouffon, le pitre, le fou] (WWBV , 2), proposes to ‘tell the truth’ about the ‘dictatorship’ and about the dictator (who is present and is addressed in the second person), ‘your dirty tricks, your bullshit, your lies, your many crimes and assassinations…’ [Toute la verité sur vos saloperies, vos conneries; nous dénoncerons vos mensonges, vos nombreux crimes et assassinats…] (WWBV , 3). But Bingo cuts him off: ‘Cease from insulting this gentleman, a man of great honour as is Koyaga, the father of our nation for if you do not ruin and damnation will hunt you down and destroy you. Hold your tongue!’ [Arrête d’injurier un grand homme d’honneur et de bien comme notre père de la nation Koyaga. Sinon la malédiction et le malheur te poursuivront et te détruiront. Arrête donc! Arrête!]. The note of sycophantic panic and fear is perhaps more perceptible in the original French, as therefore is the suggestion that Bingo is not a willing but a captive mouthpiece, one thus prepared to ironise and caricature the dictatorship even while occupying the argot of official praise. Henceforth we will hear mainly sycophancy and adulation, though Tiécoura’s subsequent interjections will often be more candid about the mendacious and murderous nature of Koyaga’s and other dictatorial regimes. Even Tiécoura’s ‘jeers’, however, will only ‘draw a good-natured smile from him they appear to insult’ (WWBV , 368). The ellipses that conclude Tiécoura’s brief interjection are therefore a kind of redaction, a starkly visible indication of all the atrocities that we glimpse here but will not fully see, the truths of the dictator’s reign that we know from the start are being kept out of sight. What follows is a heavily (but at least, in the light of Tiécoura’s silencing, openly) censored official biography of the dictator and a clearly tendentious history of French West Africa: of Koyaga’s wrestlingchampion father’s decorated service in a regiment of Senegalese infantrymen at Verdun in 1917 and his death under torture in a colonial prison; Koyaga’s precocious escapades as a master-hunter; his colonial schooling and his service in France’s late-colonial wars in Vietnam and

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Algeria; his overthrow, with three co-conspirators, of the independent République’s first president Fricassa Santos in a bloody coup d’état (the Brazilian Sylvanus Olympio was Togo’s first president); his ascent to power; and his visits to fellow dictators to learn their secrets to wealth and longevity in power. But of course this feat of sustained, often obsequious praise-singing is not to be read either literally or admiringly. The hyperbolic and sycophantic tone is blatantly unreliable. Furthermore, important events are narrated in a flagrantly anachronistic colonial idiom. From the initial summary of the République’s colonial history we learn that the French troops finally subdued the most recalcitrant subjects of their new possession and recruited them for forced labour by waiting for them, according to Bingo, to put down their weapons and gather in the sacred wood for the annual initiatory wrestling bouts. We are told that the troops do so ‘[w]ith the disinterest of civilised, Christian peoples’ [avec l’impassibilité de civilisés et de chrétiens ] (WWBV , 11): ‘one can find the French wanting in many things, but never in their vast experience as conscientious, humane colonisers’ (WWBV , 10). What is being said in this novel is brazenly slanted and insufficient. The narrator’s inability or unwillingness to communicate the Répubique’s colonial and precolonial history in anything but the antiquated idiom of colonial conquest or in the hackneyed formulae of official praise is what enables the novel to point up the radically circumscribed nature of the frame through which we are looking at those events. The now comically passé idiom of colonial condescension is further undercut by the vicious ruthlessness of a clearly far from ‘disinterested’ or impassive colonial regime. Tiécoura describes de Gaulle’s 1958 ruse of conceding nominal independence for the various states of Afrique occidentale française in exchange for continuing economic subordination, the whole scheme to be administered by a network of pliant and murderous despots. His extended account toes the official line but only so that it might hint at what an alternative account of the history of la françafrique might sound like. French West Africa could not become la France d’outre-mer, Tiécoura tells us: For obvious reasons, it looked as if it would be impossible to integrate an entire sub-continent inhabited by more than 50 million Negro savages – all of them primitive, some of them anthropophagous – into the French state without some risk that sooner or later France would be colonised by those it had colonised. On the other hand, it was unthinkable to

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leave such vast, prosperous territories, not to mention the considerable French interests and investments they contained, at the mercy of inexperienced, dishonest and irresponsible African demagogues. A political genius, General de Gaulle managed to find a satisfactory solution to the problem. De Gaulle succeeded in granting independence without decolonising. He succeeded in this by inventing and supporting presidents of republics who referred to themselves as fathers of the nation, architects of the independence of their countries, when in fact they had done nothing to win independence for their republics and were not the real masters, the true leaders of their peoples. (WWBV , 86–7)

Elections and referendums are ‘rigged in favour of… the candidates whose manifestos did not significantly clash with the colonial notion of the inferiority of the lazy, thieving Negro’ (WWBV , 88). The new leaders are coached in diplomatic protocol before being congratulated by de Gaulle on their ‘vigilant anti-communism’ and presented to the ‘Queen of England and the President of the United States – as Cold War politics demanded’. Furnished with the paraphernalia and elite privileges of flag independence they then ‘return to the colonial governor’s palace and proclaim a one-party state’ (WWBV , 89). Intellectuals in the new republic, eager to secure ambassadorial positions, busied themselves in devising a historic legitimacy for the President. They wrote hagiographies, composed poems to be sung by schoolchildren. The country’s greatest stars turned out song celebrating the thousand exploits of the Father of the Nation, the architect of independence, this Prometheus, the hero who had snatched the sovereignty of the land of their ancestors from the claws of the evil colonial oppressor. (WWBV , 89)

There is a great deal of cynical realpolitik in Tiécoura’s account of these manoeuvres. But there is no overt criticism of de Gaulle’s neo-colonial subterfuge. Rather, what this extended passage does is accentuate the constructedness of the narratives and meanings used to legitimise dictatorship and thus the prolongation of colonial power relations. It does so not only by describing the intelligentsia’s eager assumption of the role of Koyaga’s functionaries and propagandists but also by, as it were, performing that role, albeit in the kind of exaggerated way that stresses the triteness and the sheer spuriousness of the regime’s blustering hype. Koyaga cannot be both ‘the architect of independence’ and the ‘genius’ de Gaulle’s obedient factotum, both a ‘Prometheus’ and a servant of

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the French Gods that continue to rule West Africa. The ‘historic legitimacy’ devised by the intelligentsia is clearly fabricated and misleading. Just as importantly however, the official rhetoric of the new republics also colludes in camouflaging the continued sway of the former colonial power. The praise-singing of the donsomana, the demagogical and patriarchal fantasies about the nation’s ‘hero’ and ‘Father’, even the militant rhetoric about the restoration of national sovereignty—these things are not only fallacious but also structurally identical to (and compatible with) a colonial worldview that Tiécoura deploys with equal fluency: the unabashedly racist tropes, the patrician dismissals of inexperienced and demagogic African politicians and the ethnographic clichés about cannibalism. The hagiographic idiom of the donsomana is unmasked as a continuation of the self-glorifying lexicon of the mission civilisatrice. Kowtowing to both de Gaulle and Koyaga, these discourses are two techniques for legitimising the unvarying sovereignty of the colonial governor’s palace. Something is missing from both those paradoxically compatible idioms of course, which is the most important thing of all, amounting to a gigantic blind spot, the existence of which the manifestly partial narrative viewpoint constantly points towards but does not specify. And from that day forward, the titanic struggle would begin between the Father of the Nation and architect of independence, and underdevelopment. A struggle whose consequences are known to everyone today: through the tragedies into which such unspeakable aberrations plunged the whole continent of Africa. (WWBV , 89–90)

This is an enormously suggestive and complex passage. It commences in the Fanonian and Marxisant mode of anti-colonial revolt, evoking a heroic and herculean fight against economic backwardness albeit with a distinctly un-Fanon-like faith in the ‘titanesque’ figure of the nationalist leader. The cynical misuse of this radical idiom as a legitimation for dictatorial rule works to conceal what Tiécoura has already made clear, that independence on these terms means not a struggle against underdevelopment but a perpetuation of it in conformity with ‘French interests and investments’. What are not spelt out, though there is no need to because apparently they ‘are known to everyone today’, are the results of this merely rhetorical rather than actual struggle against underdevelopment: ‘les tragédies dans lesquelles les ineffables aberrations ont plongé le

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continent africain’. It is not so much that the outcome of independence is actively concealed by the text, because Tiécoura is surely correct to assume that to readers of African fiction the manifold symptoms of political and economic underdevelopment are indeed very familiar. Rather these results of independence cannot be spoken of or, crucially, cannot be articulated or explained in the propagandistic idiom employed by the novel. The consequences of the failed struggles for authentic independence are well known; they are indeed ‘unspeakable’ in the sense of being indescribably appalling, instances of physical and mental suffering beyond the power of mere words to capture. But what these consequences mean in the deeper sense of what caused them and what they tell us about the past and future of le continent is unspeakable in a slightly different sense, that is, inexpressible (ineffable) specifically by the novel we are reading. Faced by the reality of immiseration and oppression the novel resorts to massmedia cliché, characterising such human catastrophes as tragedies (which is to imply that they were somehow fated and inevitable, crimes without perpetrators), and to vagueness, presenting these misfortunes as aberrations or deviations from the norm and not, as they are, typical features of a remorseless system. Openly signalling its own descriptive and explanatory limitations therefore, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote implores its readers to devise better explanations for the phenomena its narrators cannot and dare not address. How else, the novel asks, might this history of neo-colonial continuity be told? Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is, then, ‘a satire on dictatorships’,20 as Kourouma has acknowledged, but it is not only, as Isaac Ndlovu contends, a satire on the ‘excesses’ and absurdities of those regimes.21 Of course the erection of a fortified homestead and traffic-free boulevards in Koyaga’s village recall the even more exorbitant village fiefdoms of Eyadéma, Houphouët-Boigny and Mobutu. Yet it is hardly necessary to satirise those monuments to extravagant stupidity, which are so shamelessly profligate that in a sense they satirise themselves. The same might be said for the fifth vigil’s meticulously detailed chronicle of Eyadéma’s various peccadilloes and misdeeds. Therefore Kourouma’s novel’s satire is aimed less at particular features of dictatorial regimes, such as the ‘tragic and macabre farce’ of the dictator of the République du Grand Fleuve’s palace at ‘Labodite’ (WWBV , 288) (a version of Mobutu’s lurid fiefdom at Gbadolite), than at the regimes themselves and even at the very concept of a regime. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is not only a satire on dictators but on dictatorship, the seemingly immutable

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belief that in postcolonial Africa government or sovereignty has been and always will be undemocratic by definition. The novel craves interruptions, disagreements, alternative accounts, rebellious deviations from the deplorable continuity of Togo’s typical story of essentially unchanging power. The satire is directed in part at the legends promulgated by official hagiographies. Corporal (later Sergeant) Koyaga apparently ‘transformed himself into a powerful night owl’ to escape from a Viet Minh ambush during his military service in Indochina: ‘On his left wing, he carried the prostitutes; on his right wing, fifty mountain infantrymen and their weaponry’ (WWBV , 38). Bingo recounts this story as well as similarly outlandish tales about Koyaga’s hunting exploits and his miraculous escapes from assassination with the same trustingly authoritative tone with which he relates everything else. It is not just the outlandishness of these authorised legends that is accentuated therefore, but rather the fabricated and disingenuous quality of his whole narrative. The uncertain and sometimes indiscernible events of Koyaga’s long reign have been definitively processed and shaped by these certified narratives of heroism and magical power. We are thus placed on our guard not against an occasional departure from veracity on Bingo’s part but against veracity’s routine and systematic distortion by the dictatorship, which Tiécoura tried to warn us about at the start of the novel. The chief object of the novel’s satire is itself, the very text we are reading, which represents in fact the authority—Koyaga’s dictatorial regime: in a word, the state—that presumes to warp its subjects’ memories and understandings and is therefore untruthful (i.e. mendacious, pernicious and illegitimate) in a much more profound and comprehensive sense. The capacity of the novel to speak to us with authority, to distinguish on our behalf between truth and falsehood, is exhaustively undermined, but not to the extent that we learn to distrust the very idea that postcolonial history might be chronicled in an objective way. One of the most dangerous threats to a head of state, the Man in the Fedora tells Koyaga, is ‘the distinction between truth and falsehood’ (WWBV , 224–5). Dictators should strive to prevent their citizens from evaluating ‘the orders that concern them’ (WWBV , 225): The greatest works of literature in all humanity, in every civilisation will always be fairy-tales, fictions. After all, what are the Bible, the Qur’an and the other fundamental texts of literate civilisations, great civilisations,

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timeless civilisations? What are they? That is, what do they teach us, these great religious, great literary works? A truth, and always the same truth. A man finds fulfilment and becomes a thaumaturge as soon as he frees himself of the fine distinction between truth and falsehood. (WWBV , 225)

The dictator is a novelist, just as novelists are dictators, purveyors of fictions that overpower and obscure the truth, which of course is what this novel is doing. Yet if the dictator’s magical or thaumaturgical power is to erase ‘the fine distinction between truth and falsehood’, so that citizens’ perspectives and experiences might be totally conditioned by the philosophies of those who rule, the power of the novelist is to place these feats of distortion and erasure before our eyes and to make them plainly visible. ‘Truth and lies are never far from one another and truth rarely triumphs’. That’s emphatically not the same thing as saying that truth and lies are identical or that truth never triumphs. The potential effect of the novel is to instil an empowering rejection of the tyrant’s presumption to dictate what is true. Truth might in the end be distinguished from lies, power’s fantasies from its grievous effects, but that work of ideology-critique is not something that will be accomplished on our behalf, since ultimately the power of the novel is nothing other than the power to galvanise its own readers to set about these tasks.

The Fetishism of Power We need to think further, therefore, about how the novel is indirectly lambasting not particular features of the regime but the regime itself and its control over meaning. The opening lines, like the rest of the novel, are addressed to the dictator in the second person: ‘Your name: Koyaga! Your totem: the falcon! Soldier and president are you’ (WWBV , 1). Other African dictators are also known by their epithets: Tiékoroni, ‘the wily old man with the fedora, known as ‘the Man in the Fedora’—his totem, the caiman—he was dictator of the République des Ébènes’ (WWBV , 196); Boussouma, Emperor of the Pays aux Deux Fleuves whose totem is the hyena; the dictator of the République du Grand Fleuve, whose totem is the leopard; the dictator of the République des Monts, whose totem is the hare; and the dictator of the Pays des Djebels et du Sable, whose totem is the desert jackal. These figures are thinly disguised portraits of Eyadéma’s fellow African despots: respectively, Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Cote d’Ivoire, Bokassa of the Central African Empire, Mobutu Sese

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Seko of Zaire, Ahmed Sékou Touré of Guinea and King Hassan II of Morocco. My sense is that each dictator’s association with a particular totem is an aspect of the novel’s broader critique of the fetishistic investment in dictatorial power itself. In other words the dictators’ totemic associations with beasts that might conventionally be thought to exemplify traits such as predatoriness, ferocity, deviousness and so on, are something like allegories or figures for those regimes’ similarly intense belief that this is what political power necessarily is: cunning, voracious, even flesh-devouring. These totems and fetishes are to be read as literary devices, metaphors that denote the totemic nature or, better, the fetishism of power in postcolonial Africa. But if they are metaphors then how are we to understand Kourouma’s boldly literal claim that ‘all African Heads of States practice witchcraft’?22 We should accept it at face value. The likes of Houphouët and Mobutu are ‘féticheurs ’.23 Their regimes did practice magic. The novel mercilessly lampoons, for example, the dictator of the République du Grand Fleuve’s fixation with the shrewd Senegalese architect Gaby who ‘is awarded the title of supplier emeritus of marabouts to potentates and chieftains of the one-party states’ and other ‘big-shots’ (WWBV , 283) before rising to the rank of ‘adviser charged with occult presidential affairs’, landing on the presidential yacht in a helicopter to ‘disgorge a troop of marabouts’ and conduct ‘sessions of comforting incantations’. The scholastic and political titles show how closely these practices and beliefs have been integrated into the institutions and activities of the state. We should see this closeness, then, not as incongruity but as a harmony or synchronisation between sorcery and sovereignty, albeit one that is disconcerting and often openly absurd: he whose totem is the leopard, for example, ‘never walks abroad without a suitcase full of fetishes’ and before every journey he is sure to consult his ‘sacred turtle’ (WWBV , 284). The novel’s ironical paean to the dictator is a method for inciting scepticism about the dictators’ equally unswerving and fetishistic attachment to models of violent and personalised political rule. It is not just the credulous attachment to magical trinkets that is being lampooned but the fetishism or myth of power itself and the manifold techniques for securing and maintaining power. The narrative style is a veritable tool of ‘demythification’, to use Ouédraogo’s term.24 So whereas for Koyaga the meaning of his totem, the falcon, is stable and constant then it is precisely such reifications, which are ultimately reifications of state power, that the novel

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strives to illuminate and that it encourages us to contest. Kourouma has spoken of ‘the need to clear our History of any myth, to free the people from the ancient myths’.25 The inevitability of state power is the most important modern myth that is addressed by the novel. Fetish objects in the novel, according to Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra’s compelling reading, ‘make visible the ways in which dictatorial power constructs and maintains its authority and are central to the analysis of authoritarian power’.26 If the term fetish is understood ‘in the sense inherited from anthropology and colonial ethnography’, as ‘an inanimate object imbued with magical powers that stirs superstitious or irrational dread and yet also reverence’, then power itself needs to be defined as a kind of fetish. In Kourouma’s novel Africa’s dictators present their power as being as ineluctable and as magically invulnerable as the fetishes from which that power is supposedly drawn. Both the fetish and the dictatorial power that depends upon it are imbued with magical strength. We should therefore say that the power of the fetish and the fetishism of power are Kourouma’s novel’s main themes. The fetish here stands not as an artifact of precolonial African traditional culture, as the dictator would have it, but rather as the signal of an economy of surplus meanings conditioned by an encounter between various and often competing interests. These interests, as so many dictator novels emphasize, are rooted in the competitions of global powers, which run counter to the interests of the emerging nation.27

It is true that in Kourouma’s novel fetishism does not describe ‘precolonial African traditional culture’. But I suspect that the powers and meanings imputed to the dictator’s totems and to his two fetishes are somewhat less contingent and unstable than Armillas-Tiseyra suggests. After all, the national conference at the end of the novel only renews Koyaga’s commandement, as Armillas-Tiseyra herself acknowledges: ‘“Democratic elections” is rendered as much of a fetish as the meteorite or Koran: each is a symbolic imprimatur of the ruler’s hold on power’.28 That hold on power is actually revealed by the novel to be extremely secure, which is precisely what is so fetishistic about it. The dictator’s various totems and fetishes, including ‘democratic elections’, certainly do have ‘surplus meanings’ and may be interpreted in various ways. But those subversive interpretations do not emerge and are not articulated in the course of the novel, which as we have seen is an extended (if ironic) poem of praise.

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Nor is there any competition of interest, ultimately, between the dictatorship and the global powers. But there certainly is a potential conflict outside the events and pages of the novel between the alliance of regional and global powers and the popular forces whose voices do not sound within the text but who may conceivably be galvanised by the novel’s comprehensive ‘demythification’ of the fetish of dictatorship. The dictator’s hold on power in the postcolonial period is presented throughout as a direct continuation of the power secured and exercised by the state in the colonial period. Indeed the comprehensive ideological control exerted (or at least claimed) by the postcolonial state is likened to the way in which its colonial predecessor derived its authority from the meanings and dogmas promulgated by colonial ethnography. The first vigil gets underway with an extended satire on ethnographic scholarship. The ‘conquering heroes’ of the Gulf ‘call in ethnologists’ (WWBV , 4) to study ‘savages so savage that no wise words nor brute force might reason with them’ [Des sauvages parmi les sauvages avec lesquels on ne trouve pas de langage de politesse ou violence pour communiquer]. They are named the ‘naked people’ or ‘mountain people’ (the ‘Paleonegritic people’ [les paléonigritiques] or ‘Paleos’ from whom Koyaga’s father apparently hails [WWBV , 4]). It is the priests’ task ‘to enlighten them, convert them, civilise them and so make them amenable to being colonised, controlled and exploited’ [de les évangéliser, de les christianiser, de les civiliser. De les rendre colonisables, administrables, exploitables ] (WWBV , 5). As a social or ethnic group with particular characteristics the ‘Paleos’ are not discovered by French colonial ethnography but constructed, not disinterestedly considered but defined in a wholly instrumental way that confirms to the requirements of colonial administration and exploitation. The collusion between ethnographic scholarship and military conquest is made starkly evident when, as we have seen, the ethnologists provide the French troops with the key tactical information required to conquer the ‘Paleos’ and enslave them (WWBV , 10). Bingo’s candid and straight-faced narration of the colonisation of the Gulf region in the very idiom of colonial ethnography serves to accentuate the sheer dogmatism of this enterprise. The novel places us on our guard against distinctions derived from colonial ethnography between European rationality and African backwardness. But doesn’t the very term ‘fetishism’ derive from that now wholly discredited pseudo-scientific opposition? When state power is unmasked by the novel as a fetish we need to reflect very carefully on exactly what sort of critique of the dominant

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forms assumed by political power in postcolonial Africa is being ventured here. To characterise state power, even implicitly and figuratively, as a fetish is of course very similar to the rhetorical move that Marx makes in Capital in his celebrated description of the obfuscation of social relations by capitalist forms of commodity exchange as the ‘fetishism of commodities’, relations between people assuming ‘the fantastic form of a relation between things’.29 The term fetishism is, to put it mildly, an extremely loaded one, replete as it is with powerful but extremely dubious preconceptions about the supposed ‘primitiveness’ of those beliefs and practices. To characterise a belief as fetishistic, then, is to indict it by associating it with a whole set of pejoratively defined traits derived from colonial ethnography such as backwardness, barbarousness, childishness, credulity, etc. This is emphatically not what Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote is doing. It is true that colonial ethnography is among the novel’s main voices or modes. But it is also an object of its satire. The reader soon learns that the flow of the novel’s energetic and digressive chronicles will inevitably be interrupted by some wildly archaic and illiberal piece of received colonial wisdom, so that Bingo’s tales, absorbing and compelling though they are, are never permitted to accrue too much authority or garner wholehearted consent. When Koyaga is given a tour of the capital city of the Pays des Deux Fleuves, for example, the narrator explains why the regime requires more prisons and more death row cells than were bequeathed by the French: ‘The French didn’t understand anything about Negroes, they didn’t realise that when you condemn a Negro to death, you have to kill off a whole clan if you are to have peace in the country. Negroes are vindictive, they are intensely loyal to their families’ (WWBV , 250). Who is speaking here? It is not obviously the Emperor Bossouma, whose speech is elsewhere distinguished from the main body of the text, though it does possess his garrulous, familiar tone. It is presumably Bingo then, who is partly speaking in free indirect style in Bossouma’s idiolect but is also illustrating, once again, the continuity of power (if not its intensification) between colonial and postcolonial dictatorships by talking in the pseudoscientific generalisations of a hyper-racist ethnography. Indeed all of the regimes that Koyaga tours, including his own, are presented as continuations of their colonial predecessors, Bossouma insisting for example on cutting off the hands of ‘communist traitors’, ‘as the Belgians had routinely done in the Congo, and their ears, as the French had done in Oubangui-Chari’ (WWBV , 256). The dictator of the République du

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Grand Fleuve is a veteran of the colonial Force Publique. For demanding independence from ‘a young, tiny country’ of ‘eight million Christian, peace-loving, petit-bourgeois Europeans’ (WWBV , 260) the ‘natives’ [les indigènes ] of the République du Grand Fleuve are dismissed as ‘ungrateful indigenous savages’ (WWBV , 265). Among the regime’s purposes, passed on by Koyaga’s ‘white advisers’, is ‘the salvation of the fuzzy-wuzzies’ [le salut des têtes crépues ] (WWBV , 404). The novel appears to assume, once more, the language of racist colonial ethnography from which allegations of primitive fetishism are derived. Of course Marx’s phrase owes its own rhetorical force to its ability to turn colonial judgements about what is primitive on their heads. It designates the ostensibly modern as in fact ‘primitively’ superstitious. The figure of ‘commodity fetishism’, as W.J.T. Mitchell has argued in a classic reading, is a kind of catachresis, a violent yoking of the most primitive, exotic, irrational, degraded objects of human value with the most modern, ordinary, rational, and civilized. In calling commodities fetishes, Marx is telling the nineteenth-century reader that the material basis of modern, civilized, rational political economy is structurally equivalent to that which is most inimical to modern consciousness.30

According to Marx, capitalist commodity exchange is tantamount to the primitive worship of inanimate objects, just as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness ventures a similarly damning (if more indirect) critique of the doctrine or idea of colonial expansion when Marlow unknowingly likens that idea to fetish-worship, ‘something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to’.31 But does the derivation of this rhetorical strategy from colonial ethnography deprive it of some of its subversive force? By deriding Koyaga’s reliance on fetishes does Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote not simply repeat the colonial dismissal of colonised cultures as uncivilised and inferior? Is the dictator an incarnation of a backward culture, one that requires guidance by some more ‘civilised’ external power? Not at all, because in my view both Marx and Kourouma substantially redefine the distinction between European ‘modernity’ and African ‘backwardness’ from which the allegation of fetishism appears to derive its accusatory force. Fetishism is the practice that preoccupies what I am arguing is a powerfully if mutedly anti-colonial novel. This is the case, I want to suggest,

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because the novel endeavours to do what the theory of the fetishism of commodities in Capital does, which is to subvert the ideology and language of colonial progress by employing it. Commodity exchange is a fetish, says Marx, a mark of backwardness; the purportedly and avowedly most advanced form of human civilisation is anything but. Similarly, the worship of state power, the belief that power is and always will be the preserve of autocracies, is a fetish no less than the dictators’ attribution of magical powers of invincibility to Koyaga’s Qur’an and aerolite are fetishes. It is a ‘myth’ from which Kourouma has said he wishes to set us free. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote demonstrates the disturbing continuity between the colonial and postcolonial regimes (both of which dismiss Africa and Africans as exemplifications of the ‘primitive’) while indicting their self-certainty, their inflexible sense of the fixed inevitability of undemocratic political power as the most grievous and powerful, or to use Mitchell’s terms the most primitive, irrational and degraded, fetish of all. Readers of Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote are forearmed by its first vigil against any temptation to make hasty ethnographic judgements about what is ‘primitive’. The effect of the novel is rather to discredit those supposed authorities that have the presumption to make such judgements. It is not the case, then, that Koyaga’s totems and fetish objects are signs of some sort of backward traditionalism. To the contrary, they stand for state power as well as for the speciously ‘modern’ economic system that state power upholds, which they therefore indict not so much for being objects of ‘traditional’ worship but for being reifications whose fixedness forestalls any substantive political and economic transformations. One might go further, as Armillas-Tiseyra does, by adding that the fetish is revealed here as an object that is subject to ‘a larger dynamic of meaning-making’.32 By presenting state power itself as a fetish whose meanings might be made visible and even contested the novel encourages us to take control of or to de-reify the meaning-making prerogatives of the République du Golfe’s propaganda machine, the griot Bingo and Maclédio, Koyaga’s secretary and amanuensis: ‘the fetish also marks the vulnerability of authoritarian power… It is the site where the dynamics of power become visible, and it is also the point from which it becomes possible to read against the dictator’.33 What is also fetishised or reified by the regime’s propaganda machine is language itself, the ironisation of language being the main technique by which the novel seeks to accomplish language’s defetishisation. Christiane

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Ndiaye is therefore right to argue that the dominant critical reception of Kourouma’s work in France, where his novels have been garlanded with numerous accolades and awards, tends to minimise what she calls its ‘literariness’ and instead presents Kourouma not as a novelist at all but as ‘the author of historical documents or ethnographic studies’.34 Whether critics are praising the ‘authenticity’ of his Malinké-infused French or lauding him as a courageous witness to dictatorship and violence, they tend to present Kourouma’s work as an essentially realist undertaking, in the process (I would add) missing this novel’s meditation on how ‘the real’ is actively distorted and concealed by the very discourse of dictatorship that the text adopts. It might be more accurate to characterise what Ndiaye calls the novel’s ‘literariness’ as its intensely modernistic (as opposed to realist) stress on the non-transparency of language, on language’s partiality and figurativeness. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote certainly is not a ‘historical document’, but to the contrary a sustained testament to (even outwardly an example of) history’s censorship and distortion at the hands of state propaganda. Bingo’s adaptable and chameleon-like narrative voice adopts zealously whichever ideology is in vogue in the various dictatorships visited by Koyaga, parroting for example the République des Ebenes’ cant about its ‘strategic position in the war against engulfment by international totalitarian communism’ (WWBV , 217). Mainly, of course, the novel provides a self-conscious narration of events from the manifestly partial (in both senses of that word) standpoint of Koyaga’s regime’s propagandists. What this technique potentially engenders is a scepticism about those colonial and postcolonial authorities that seek to use language to control the narratives and meanings we employ to make sense of the uses and origins of political power. Thus the proverbs that conclude each section are certainly not encapsulations of traditional wisdom. ‘Tiécoura! Proverbs are the thoroughbreds of language [Le proverbe est le cheval de la parole]; when words fail, it is through proverbs that we find them again. One must rise early if one is to walk a long road by nightfall’ (WWBV , 41). This proverb, however, is more of an old nag than a thoroughbred. The meaning is simply banal and glib. The recitation of proverbs at the end of each chapter rapidly becomes monotonous and tiresome, not least because their sheer number alerts us less and less to their particular meanings and increasingly to the dubiousness of the practice of trying to encapsulate and impart meanings in these singular little maxims. Whereas the main narrative requires us

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at length to read between the lines and painstakingly to contest Bingo’s words these pithy morals, by contrast, ask to be taken at face value. They appear to invite acquiescence not disagreement. Nonetheless where their surface meanings are not merely trite they are positively objectionable. ‘In a herd, there can be only one male hippopotamus’ (WWBV , 122) and ‘You will escape the damp of the dew if you walk behind an elephant ’ (WWBV , 15) are propaganda masquerading as wisdom. ‘A leader has need of men, and men of a leader’ (WWBV , 309) is downright fascistic. ‘If the little mouse leaves the paths of its forefathers, the spikes of the scutchgrass will gouge out his eyes ’ (WWBV , 68), we are warned. In the end these proverbs are dulled by repetition, reduced to mere platitudes that encourage readers not to walk behind the elephant or stick to the paths of one’s forefathers but to do the opposite of those things and to be on their guard against the use of language and ‘traditional’ wisdom to justify dictatorial power. In the fourth vigil these maxims are characterised as ‘proverbs on power’ (WWBV , 205) and while their apparent purpose might be to justify power their eventual effect is to haul power’s expedient manipulation of language and ‘tradition’ into the open where it can be scrutinised and disavowed.

Dictatorship ‘Goes On and On’ Koyaga’s regime’s hackneyed anti-communist propaganda is an alibi for the expedient alliance between the postcolonial regime and its former colonial masters. The differences between the apparently competing systems of Cold War Africa are revealed to be entirely superficial. Koyaga is be ‘the breakwater on which founder the waves of international communism surging towards Africa’ (WWBV , 335), though such tiresome hoopla is undermined both by the staleness of its metaphors and by the fact that these new Francophone states’ presidents’ speeches to the General Assembly were all written by the French ambassador to the UN. Even the differences between the new states in the socialist and those in the capitalist camps are merely cosmetic. What is truly essential, Tiecoura’s sceptical interjection insists, is the ‘monopolistic’ and subordinate nature of these new states. The Man in White was a socialist and was showered with praise, admiration and support by the East; Tiékoroni the capitalist had at his disposal the say-so of the West. The contrast in their apparent political thought

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had no effect whatever on the political organisation of the two regimes. The peoples of the two countries were equally consigned to the hands of corrupt leaders: monopolistic, mendacious, one-party butchers of freedom. So adds Tiécoura. (WWBV , 197)

Of course it is the capitalist West that ultimately prevails in the Cold War, but that fact does not touch on anything important for leaders who believe like Tiékoroni ‘in continuing to entrust all responsibilities to the White Man, keeping the Negro on a leash and, from time to time, thrashing any of his compatriots who dared to raise their heads’ (WWBV , 198). His travels among the fiefdoms of his fellow despots teach Koyaga a variety of Machiavellian strategies for maintaining his power. What Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote teaches its readers, ultimately, is the amazing durability of the dictatorial system itself, which the novel presents as ubiquitous and long-lasting, a colonial imposition prolonged by a variety of methods and subterfuges in the ostensibly postcolonial epoch. The novel’s purposefully anti-climactic denouement, in which a democratic revolution is unexpectedly foiled, emphasises the regime’s exasperating resilience. What has until now been an extremely digressive novel, mainly a series of biographical portraits of Koyaga, his confrères and fellow despots, finally assumes the form of a plot the ostensible outcome and meaning of which is that political resistance is doomed to failure. The events of the final vigil, in which Koyaga outmanoeuvres the forces of the opposition at a national conference in order to remain in power, are a provocative demonstration of the dictatorship’s durability. That durability is reassuring for the official narrative voice of the novel but horrifying for readers who might have been lulled into expecting a portrayal of the regime’s downfall. What is instructive about this novel’s final vigil, then, is that it frustrates and postpones the anticipated political comeuppance of the dictatorial system of power it has thus far carefully discredited. It incites but does not satisfy the craving for a conclusive endgame. Kourouma refrains from delivering a definitive or reassuring account of the necessary outcome or end of dictatorial power, bequeathing the task of imagining and effecting such a resolution to his readers. The sixth and final vigil opens with an extravagant celebration of the Supreme Guide’s thirty years in power. This ostentatious, spendthrift performance of the dictator’s and therefore the regime’s vigour is exemplified by the ‘interminable procession’ (WWBV ,

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399) of regiments, women’s and youth groups, cavorting troupes of the dictator’s offspring, bands of sorcerers and shamans, party activists and many others. Seemingly the entire population of this pintsized state is assembled not to be looked at but themselves to feast their eyes on the totally (and symbolically) unmoving and seemingly unmoveable figure of the despot, resplendent in his marshal’s uniform, arm raised in perpetual salute. Dictators of every persuasion, from Pinochet to Ceausescu and Kim Il Sung to Papa Doc Duvalier, send their eulogies and there is a comically elongated list of accolades bestowed on Koyaga by every conceivable international organisation. But the magnificent celebration is also, it seems, ‘the incident that was to set everyone free’ (WWBV , 397). Government employees have not been paid and the managing director of the Agricultural Production Stabilisation Fund is obliged to tell Koyaga that he can no longer disburse enough money to compensate for the falling world prices of cotton, coffee and cocoa, the remaining funds having been embezzled for the anniversary celebrations (WWBV , 400). Far from being invulnerable, it seems that the regime is on borrowed time. At this point the novel becomes a veritable catechism for those who, like the dictator, are uninitiated into the magical convolutions of structural adjustment (WWBV , 401). It should be recalled that in an earlier, similarly didactic passage the dictator of the République du Grand Fleuve who has bankrupted his country and destroyed its infrastructure ‘takes advantage of this situation to conform with IMF recommendations and proceeds with massive redundancies in the public sector’ (WWBV , 293), causing teachers and civil servants, even the army and the police, to descend in their tens of thousands on the mining villages to find work.35 This super-exploitation of the poor and of the earth, with the state reduced to the role of bystander and plunderer-in-chief, is christened ‘economic liberalism’ (WWBV , 296). Here it is the novel’s readers and not just Koyaga who is learning lessons, in this case about the origins and disastrous consequences of neoliberalism in Africa, though of course these are presumably not the lessons that he whose totem is the leopard intends to impart. The French President François Mitterrand has now advised African leaders ‘to change their policies, to cease operating as dictators and become saintly democrats’. France has accordingly ended its automatic payments to the treasury and ‘requires that the dictator first sign an SAP with the IMF’ (WWBV , 401). A baffled and angry Koyaga and the

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compliant general secretary of the country’s sole trade union soon sign the agreement. This is a key moment in the novel when a befuddled and blindsided (as opposed to omnipotent) regime is obliged to comply with the new dispensation of structural adjustment. Likewise the previously obedient (if puckishly arch) voice of the main narrator, previously so reticent about the effects of Koyaga’s power, becomes loquaciously didactic as the local representative of the IMF spells out at length the draconian terms of the SAP: Everything must cease, everything must be stopped, suspended or interrupted, trimmed down or cut back, cut short or pruned, simplified or abandoned, given up or sacrificed, shut down or relocated. No more subsidised festivals or dances. Cut backs in the number of teachers, nurses, women in childbirth, newborn babies, schools, policemen, sentries and presidential guards. No more subsidies for rice, sugar, milk for babies, cotton, and bandages for the wounded, tablets for leprosy and those with sleeping sickness. Construction of schools, roads, bridges, dams, maternity clinics, health centres, palaces and prefectures must be sacrificed. No further help for the blind, the deaf, no subsidies for paper, for sinking wells, for eating butter and cocoa. Reduce the workforce, close down companies, etc. (WWBV , 401–2).

This IMF-dictated orgy of austerity and deregulation under the cover of ‘democratisation’ represents an intensification of oppression and impoverishment, a retreat of the state to its repressive function and its total abandonment of any developmental role. The prospect of a substantive transformation in the République du Golfe depends instead upon the arrival on the national scene of a third actor, in addition to the ‘authoritarian state and the submissive populace’ (WWBV , 401): ‘wasted youth, a tribe of the “unschooled”, the aimless, of pickpockets and burglars’, referred to ‘in one of your [i.e. Koyaga’s] astounding, hate-filled diatribes… in front of the Assembly as bilakoro [uncircumcised] thugs, drug-addicts and homosexuals… the drop-outs, the stone-throwers’ (WWBV , 403). Such abusive epithets show that Koyaga and his acolyte Bingo find it impossible to account for the visibility and political strength of this new constituency. These are in fact the educated but jobless youth, the ‘young workers driven out of offices and factories by closures, cut-backs and business restructuring’, those ‘who had learned from bitter experience, from injustice and lies’ and who heard the tolling of ‘the bell signalling the leap from dictatorship to

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democracy’ (WWBV , 405): in short, the ‘wild beasts’ or les bêtes sauvages ‘which would destroy you’ (WWBV, 404). That appellation now refers both to the hunter Koyaga’s veritable hecatomb of slaughtered fauna and to the dictator’s other victims who have been disinherited by the expedient compact with Mitterrand and the IMF. What the English adjective ‘wild’ hardly captures is the regime’s obsession (inherited of course from the language of colonial ethnography) with the reputed ‘savagery’ of a group to which Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly give the more respectful (if somewhat imprecise) term ‘political society’. The novel attributes the involvement of this growing urban underclass in political protest to its intense economic deprivation and insecurity. Political society’s ‘relation to state power’ is ‘a relation defined by an alternation between neglect and direct violence’, according to Branch and Mampilly.36 That relation is rarely mediated by law or by institutions. Without any such investments in the status quo, this group therefore ‘targets all aspects of life – political, economic, social, and cultural’.37 Of course the amorphous revolt of ‘political society’ is not enough to make a lasting and substantive revolution. For that there must be concrete demands and programmes, in addition to alliances with rural groups, workers and others. When the IMF’s ‘restructuring’ of state companies leads to compulsory redundancies in the railway sector the bilakoros therefore join the striking workers on the picket lines (WWBV , 411). When the state responds with massacres the bilakoros attempt to gain the sympathy of powerful external actors by taking the bodies of the dead to be laid out in the gardens of the French and US embassies and surrounding streets. Koyaga’s pleas for support and his threats ‘to switch sides, to become a red, to bring Cubans to Africa, Chinese from mainland China’ are greeted only by the blunt declaration that ‘[t]he Cold War is over, done with’ (WWBV , 413). The dictatorship requires a new ideology to license its depredations. It is difficult to tell with what authority Bingo reports the bilakoros’ ‘fury of destruction and vandalism’. ‘Lecherous lepers raped the nuns who nursed them’ (WWBV , 416). Is this a reliable account of the putative insurrection, an example of the regime’s desperate propaganda or a lurid newspaper headline penned by the attendant world media? Is ‘political society’ predominantly a revolutionary force or an anarchic one, the vanguard of a democratic order or a bribable lumpenproletariat? The novel does not seek or claim to answer such questions. As ever, the regime and its spokespeople denounce this new threat in the language

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of colonial power. The constitution is amended, trade unions legalised and a general amnesty announced. But this alternately neglected and violently policed underclass of wild or savage beasts who have not yet been permitted to vote, with nothing to lose in the current order and therefore everything to gain from establishing a new one, is in any case betrayed by the intellectuals who return from their exile in France to hijack the National Convention that Koyaga concedes at the height of the revolutionary violence. Descendants of ‘Christian freedmen… exempted from the duties of forced labour’, the ‘[e]volved Negroes who, logically, constituted a separate class midway between the white civilised Christian and the naked, savage Negro simpleton’ (WWBV , 422), this privileged class takes ‘over the leadership of the revolution’ (WWBV , 423). The novel depicts ‘countless non-governmental associations’ (WWBV , 423) and ‘black French executives who lived in France and whose assets and families, in their entirety, were in France’ (WWBV , 434) assuming control of the country. Described in the language and official categories of colonial administration as ‘évolués’, they are the latest in a succession of ruling elites going back to the period of direct French control. In the end the revolution does not succeed in ‘exorcising the country, its people, its beasts, its things, everything that had been ensnared, bewitched by Nadjouma and her aerolite, Bokano and his Qur’an’ (WWBV , 425). We should understand the abortive revolution as a moment of only potential transition to a more democratic order, one that is countenanced but not undertaken, shown to be possible but not carried through to completion. The delegates to the Convention vote themselves a gigantic salary and disregard the ‘clear-cut demands’ of the bilakoros (WWBV , 427). ‘The struggle, the uprising had profited only the delegates, the messengers boys and the militia; all in all a minority, a mere handful of the bilakoros ’ (WWBV , 428). The claim to novelty enjoyed by the ‘new era of liberty, fraternity and respect for human dignity’ that is toasted at champagne dinners to the gentle accompaniment of orchestras (WWBV , 430) is its high-sounding watchwords: saintly ‘democracy’, ‘humanism and universalism’ (WWBV, 424). But even these new slogans are in fact not new at all and sound suspiciously like the fetishised ideologies of la mission civilisatrice. A bewitched nation and its magically immutable state are not definitively exorcised. The dictatorial power of the state is substantially unreformed, a verdict confirmed when the army accompanied by the disillusioned bilakoros dissolves the Convention, imprisons the delegates and restores Koyaga to supreme power.

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Yet we should, I think, resist the temptation to interpret the chaotic ending of the novel, with its ‘indescribable’ ‘pandemonium’ of raging bush fires, machete-wielding peasants seeking to return to their ancestral lands, armed hunters seeking to protect the lucrative game reserves from these poaching hordes and fleeing beasts of every description, as a kind of symbolic conflagration in which the endlessly postponed dreams of liberation are finally consumed. Koyaga who has once more faked his own death in an effort to smoke out his enemies witnesses this chaotic spectacle from the presidential plane. Though the news of his demise is, alas, much exaggerated this is nonetheless an apocalyptic final scene, one that does not quite lead to the effortless reconstitution of dictatorial state power. ‘I will soon be democratically elected, I will have all the power of old’ (WWBV , 438). But despite this confidence and despite the fact that during his brief absence Koyaga’s fellow dictators have arrived to search for the Qur’an and the aerolite in order ‘to become heir to the invulnerability, the sorcery which had always saved you’ (WWBV , 439), the fetishes have disappeared and their return is by no means guaranteed. At this point Koyaga recalls that the sources of those fetishes, his mother Nadjouma and the marabout Bokano, ‘told you time and again what you must do if one day you were to find yourself lost: you must have your purificatory rite as a master hunter, your cathartic donsomana recounted by a sora, a chronicler of hunters, and his responder’ (WWBV, 444). What is thereby revealed is that the purpose of the novel we have nearly read and of the praise-singing performance to which we have so far attended was to relocate the fetishised sources of the dictator’s power, to renew and prolong authoritarian rule in an age of ostensible democratic empowerment. When you have recovered the Qur’an and the aerolite, you will ready yourself for democratic presidential elections. Elections based on universal suffrage supervised by an independent national commission. You will seek a new mandate secure in the knowledge that you will triumph, that you will be re-elected. For you know, you are certain, that if by chance men refuse to vote for you, the beasts will come from the jungle, will lay their hands on ballot papers and will elect you by a landslide. (WWBV , 445)

The reconstitution or otherwise of authoritarian state power is dependent on the novel itself, whose outcomes and meanings are in large part dependent on its readers. Indeed the novel ends not with an image of the

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permanence of dictatorial power but with an instance of insubordination and therefore an indication that the ‘wild beasts’, the dictator’s subjects, might not intervene to perpetuate his power. Importantly, Tiécoura disobeys Bingo’s authority in order to recite proverbs that this time are neither glib nor prescriptive but, amidst the cacophony of the dictator’s potential downfall, suggestive and even faintly auspicious. Calm yourself, Tiécoura… The koroduwa refuses to obey the commands of the sora who, amid the barking, speaks these proverbs: There are not enough cows to fill all the fields the mind can conjure. At the end of one’s tether, there is Heaven. The night goes on and on, but day will come in time. (WWBV , 445, emphasis in the original)

Will the fetishes be relocated and will dictatorial power thus be endlessly reconstituted? Will the novel in our hands fulfil its official purpose? If the objective of the donsomana that we have been reading is to relocate the fetishes then the ostensible task of the novel is likewise to reconstitute dictatorship, to eulogise and censor dictatorship, to relocate and reaffirm the fetish of power by convincing Bingo’s listeners of dictatorship’s permanence even in an era of apparent democratisation. So when we recall that it is dictatorial power itself that is the supreme fetish in the postcolonial state then we must conclude that dictatorial power’s renewal is dependent in part on how the donsomana is received by its auditors. Is dictatorship too wily and resilient, its allies too powerful and the forces of opposition too divided and disorganised? Is its invulnerability to revolutionary challenge positively preternatural? Does the donsomana really have the power to reconstitute dictatorship? Or is this protracted performance of power in fact a cryptic advertisement for power’s secret vulnerability? Power is dependent on whether the novel succeeds in the task that is still unaccomplished at the frenzied denouement, the task of relocating the fetishes and therefore convincing readers that dictatorship is indeed invulnerable. There is no guarantee that this performance will be read in the way that Koyaga and his accomplice hope or expect it to be read. Like the insubordinate responder Tiécoura we are capable of reacting to this tale with disobedience and to the final cryptic proverbs with faith in the imagination, utopian longing even in the midst of despair and with a tentative trust in the possibility of a political daybreak after the night of dictatorship that ‘goes on and on’ (WWBV , 445).

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‘A Praxis That Has Yet to Begin’ Wizard of the Crow and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote are ultimately novels that seek to encourage emergent and revolutionary forms of awareness and solidarity. The Movement for the Voice of the People originates in Santamaria, a shantytown in the capital Eldares while the bilakoros are an urban underclass thrown into desperate poverty by structural adjustment. Wizard of the Crow thus returns to Ng˜ ug˜ı’s preoccupation in 1977’s Petals of Blood with the rapid and catastrophic processes of capitalist ‘modernisation’ and urbanisation. Vividly sketched as an immense theatre of diversity and creativity as well as injustice and ill-treatment, Eldares stands for the sprawling Bidonvilles and shanty towns proliferating on the peripheries of Africa’s cities. Eldares is Nairobi of course (just as Santamaria is Kibera and Mathare) just as the revolutionary city of the République du Golfe is Lomé, Yamoussoukro and Abidjan, but they are also Kinshasa-Brazzaville, Lagos and Cairo: places, as Mike Davis has shown, that are simultaneously vast slums and venues of exploitation but also sites of new and inventive forms of solidarity and of cultural and linguistic expression. Due to what he calls African states’ ‘treasonous’ failure to provide housing for urban workers, particularly since the catastrophic downsizing of the public sector after the IMF- World Bank-dictated restructurings of the 1980s, Mike Davis argues that urbanisation in these vast cities ‘has been more radically decoupled from industrialization, even from development per se’ (PS, 13): ‘the postcolonial state has comprehensively betrayed its original promises to the urban poor’ (PS, 69). Of course urbanisation in Africa did not begin with structural adjustment. In many states industrialisation policies that over-taxed rural workers in order to bankroll manufacturing and that forced workers to sell their produce at belowmarket rates encouraged internal migrations to Africa’s cities. So too did the removal at independence of the strict rules that regulated the movements of populations during the colonial period. But since the imposition of structural adjustment a myriad of factors across the continent such as agricultural deregulation and falling commodity prices has prompted an even vaster exodus of rural workers and their families to urban slums. Their ranks have been swelled by newly destitute city-dwellers previously employed in manufacturing and the civil service. The slums of Nairobi and Mombasa absorbed 85% of Kenya’s population growth in the 1990s (PS, 18). Davis refuses to see the inhabitants of such vast and overcrowded metropolises as heroic squatters fashioning

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creatively improvised settlements let alone as entrepreneurs or microcapitalists whose informal means of employment constitute a kind of grassroots capital accumulation. In fact these are the most exploited people on earth, rack-rented poor tenants with few rights of citizenship, the prey of developers and slumlords, deprived of access to water and sanitation, ignored or else harassed and hustled by the forces of the state. Third-world megacities, in which massive and expanding slums of exploited humanity exist cheek by jowl with the fortified splendour of equally extreme wealth in a grim facsimile of the racially zoned colonial city (PS, 96), are veritable microcosms of the entire world economy. ‘The violently policed divisions of colonial cities are resurrected, as, across the continent, private security regimes, gated communities, fortified malls, and militarized public and private space expand along with the surrounding slums’.38 Embattled rentiers wall themselves off from the under- and informally employed multitudes in ‘suburban laagers with their ubiquitous gates, housing estates, and barricaded public streets’ (PS, 117). Meanwhile the slums are incubating a ‘global informal working class’ (PS, 178) in which extremes of destitution, the millions of ragpickers, street vendors and piece-workers who conjure their bare subsistence on the outermost margins of the urban economy, begin to resemble the increasingly casualised, rights-deprived world of formal employment (PS, 178). Wizard of the Crow and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote envision the revolutionary self-consciousness of that class. Indeed the Movement for the Voice of the People, which even this Babel-like cacophony of a novel presents as a voice singular rather than as a medley of voices plural (and therefore as a concerted party-style movement not a directionless alliance of multifarious groupings), is a vision of organisational unity. It brings together street gangs, feminist action groups and revolutionary social and religious movements. As Davis contends, ‘the future of human solidarity depends upon the militant refusal of the new urban poor to accept their marginality within global capitalism’ (PS, 202). These novels perform dictatorial power in order to discredit it and bemoan its longevity, to incite critique and resistance and thus to open the way to transformative democratic action. They should both be construed as radical and even revolutionary performance spaces. Richard Poirier, one of Edward Said’s intellectual mentors, argues in his intricate reflections on the subject that the rapt attention given to performance, by which he means any kind of physical, verbal, linguistic or aesthetic act, can heighten

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one’s sensitivity to the possibility of change, rejuvenation, improvisation and creative expression: in short, to all those experiences that militate against imitation and slavish repetition. In this way literature and attentive, active ways of reading it ‘can be an object lesson for other more distinctly political or social performances’.39 John Updike was therefore mistaken when he suggested that Ng˜ ug˜ı’s ‘bulky book offers more indignation than analysis in his portrait of postcolonial Africa’.40 Wizard of the Crow does far more than bear witness to the criminality and cupidity of undemocratic regimes; it provides an exhaustive analysis of the origins of these regimes in a colonial and also neo-colonial world-system and it also anticipates democratic alternatives to the various forms of authoritarianism that have bedevilled postcolonial Africa. As Gerald Martin has said of the Latin American variant, the force of the dictator novel lies ‘in the tension between aspiration and reality’,41 between the possibility of democracy and its denial in present conditions. Wizard of the Crow indicts Africa’s kleptocrats while encouraging us to track down the origins of their felonies to the durable system of colonialism itself. In addition, there is the normative power of the dictator novel. Lest we look on these works and despair we must emphasise their capacity to stage, predict and even encourage the radical democratic resistance that threatens to make dictatorship a thing of the past. As Colson observes, ‘the future of the nation, a future beyond authoritarian rule, is the novel’s principle [sic] concern’.42 In order to open out that future the novel debunks the dictator’s purportedly omnipotent sovereignty by recalling his rise to power at the behest of Abur˜ıria’s colonial masters and by stressing his continued subservience to the ‘interests’ of Western states and global financial institutions. Its subject is dictatorship exerted in the era and aftermath of structural adjustment, ‘otherwise known’, in Naomi Klein’s words, ‘as the dictatorship of debt’.43 As we have seen, it is not the case, as Colson suggests, that ‘as the novel comes to its conclusion, so does the Ruler’s regime’44 for Wizard of the Crow also challenges the most pernicious myth of all about African dictatorship: that the era of ‘multiparty democracy’ and ‘human development’ has made it a thing of the past. What is chiefly impressive about Ng˜ ug˜ı’s oeuvre is the consistency of its opposition to the systematic and unremitting nature of colonialism’s domination of Africa. Its greater stress on performance and polyphony is, admittedly, a notable development in the form of Ng˜ ug˜ı’s literary work, but it is one which enables Ng˜ ug˜ı to remain even more committed to a militant critique of a phenomenon that is

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only ever euphemised and misguidedly acquitted of its ongoing crimes by terms like ‘globalisation’, ‘the postcolony’ and the smooth space of ‘Empire’. That is not to say, of course, that the violent and larcenous system of neo-colonialism is unimpeded or that Africa’s peoples are its helpless victims, for what emerges from Wizard of the Crow with considerable force is above everything else the necessity and reality of the struggle, within the text and much more importantly beyond its pages, for meaningful decolonisation in Africa. The relentlessly indebted and dependent postcolonial state is illuminated by the novel’s fantastic figurations. Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, meanwhile, is preoccupied with the power of fetishism and the fetishism of power. Yet readers will search in vain for any optimistic portrayal of the grievously dispossessed urban poor overthrowing the structures of authoritarian rule. Even in the midst of anarchic disorder, power remains fixed in place by the hardline certainties of the ruling elites that are rehearsed but at least made visible by the novel’s main narrator. By re-performing power, the novel certainly contributes to power’s defetishisation. But that is not yet a political achievement. The bêtes sauvages have not voted and may never get to vote. Both novels refuse to be blinded to these truths by the precipitate rhetoric of popular empowerment: ‘Democracy, the voice of the people, the sovereign will of the people. All that shit…’, as Birahima puts it in Allah is Not Obliged.45 Satire, John Clement Ball reminds us, borrows or occupies rhetorical forms in order to exaggerate and discredit them. It usually does so, he argues, in order to assert the moral or political standards that the object of satire is thereby revealed to have transgressed.46 But the performances of dictatorship in Wizard of the Crow and Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote are less affirmations of existing standards than they are portents of (even better, appeals for) an as yet merely emergent political praxis. They countenance but do not and of course on their own cannot effect a transition beyond this deplorable state of affairs. Novelists only perform the world; the point is to change it.47 They are beholden to or at the mercy of those struggles I have been outlining, the outcome of which they cannot foresee. They draw credit, in Theodor Adorno’s words, ‘from a praxis that has yet to begin’.48

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Notes 1. Jean Ouédraogo, ‘Ahmadou Kourouma and Ivoirian Crises’, Research in African Literatures, 35:3 (2004), 1–5. 2. Carrol F. Coates presents Kourouma’s whole oeuvre, from Les soleils des indépendances to the unfinished Quand on refuse, as an unrelenting ‘excoriation’ of dictatorial regimes in postcolonial Africa, particularly that of Côte d’Ivoire’s Félix Houphouët-Boigny. Her analysis is more concerned with the content rather than the forms of Kourouma’s work. Carrol F. Coates, ‘A Fictive History of Côte d’Ivoire: Kourouma and “Fouphouai”’, Research in African Literatures, 38:2 (2007), 124–139. 3. Jean Ouédraogo, ‘An Interview with Ahmadou Kourouma’, Callaloo, 23:4 (2000), pp. 1338–1348 (p. 1338). 4. Ahmadou Kourouma, Allah Is Not Obliged, trans. Frank Wynne, London: Vintage, 2006 [2000], p. 171. 5. Jeremy Friedman, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015. 6. Quoted in Panitch and Gindin, The Making of Global Capitalism, p. 95. 7. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace, Boston: South End Press, 1985, p. 48. 8. Neil Smith, ‘After the American Lebensraum: “Empire”, Empire, and Globalization’, Interventions, 5:2 (2003), 249–270 (p. 256). 9. Noam Chomsky therefore argues that ‘the Cold War can be understood, in large measure, as an interlude in the North-South conflict of the Colombian era’. Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Boston: South End Press, 1993, p. 65. 10. Charles Piot, Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, pp. 25–27. Subsequent references are given in the main text after NF . 11. Giovanni Arrighi, ‘Lineages of Empire’, in Debating Empire, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan, London: Verso, pp. 29–42 (p. 34). 12. Ellen Meiksins Wood, ‘A Manifesto for Global Capitalism?’ in Debating Empire, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan, London: Verso, 2003, pp. 61–82 (p. 68). Elsewhere Meiksins Wood argues that ‘just as globalization is not a truly integrated world economy, it is also not a system of declining nation states… The world today is more than ever a world of nation states. The political form of globalization is not a global state or global sovereignty. Nor does the lack of correspondence between global economy and national states simply represent some kind of time-lag in political development. The very essence of globalization is a global economy administered by a global system of multiple states and local sovereignties, structured in a complex relation of domination and subordination’. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Empire of Capital, London: Verso, 2003, p. 139.

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13. ‘The first act by virtue of which the state really constitutes itself the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – this is, at the same time, its last independent act as a state. State interference in social relations becomes, in one domain after another, superfluous, and then withers away of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished”. It withers away’. Friedrich Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968, pp. 394–428 (p. 424). I have used the better known formulation ‘withers away’ rather than ‘dies out’, the preferred translation of the Soviet-edited Selected Works of Marx and Engels that I have used here. The ‘withering away of the state’ is of course a central and much-debated axiom of the Marxist theory of the transition to communism. See the essays contained in Ralph Miliband’s Class War Conservativism, Revised edition, London: Verso, 2015; and Robert C. Tucker’s The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1970, pp. 54–91. 14. On the takeover of power by Eyadéma’s son see Adewale Banjo, ‘Constitutional and Succession Crisis in West Africa: The Case of Togo’, African Journal of Legal Studies, 2.2 (2008), 147–161. The political economy of oil in the Gulf of Guinea in the 2000s is explored by Ricardo M. Soares De Oliveira’s, Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea, London: C. Hurst, 2007. 15. Béatrice Hibou’s contribution to this useful volume focuses on how structural adjustment has enabled several African states to move from a ‘kleptocratic’ to a more openly ‘felonious’ status, ‘The “Social Capital” of the State as an Agent of Deception, or The Ruses of Economic Intelligence’, Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou, The Criminalization of the State in Africa, Oxford: James Currey, 1989, pp. 69–113. 16. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 146. Ian P. MacDonald reads Wizard of the Crow as Ng˜ ug˜ı’s formulation of ‘an anti-imperialism suited to the new paradigms of empire described at length, however problematically, by scholars like Hardt and Negri’. ‘The Cybogre Manifesto: Time, Utopia, and Globality in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow’, Research in African Literatures, 47:1 (2016), 57–75 (p. 73). MacDonald doesn’t tell us what those problems are. In my view they are insurmountable. Both novels effectively contest rather than support Empire’s thesis. They suggest that the only changes to the imperialist domination of Africa have been cynically superficial and expedient.

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17. Ndongo Samba Sylla, ‘From a Marginalised to an Emerging Africa? A Critical Analysis’, Review of African Political Economy, 41.1 (2014), 7–25 (p. 22). 18. Ray Bush, ‘Africa: A Political Economy of Continued Crisis’, Afrika Focus, 31.2 (2018), 23–46. See also Ian Taylor, ‘Dependency Redux: Why Africa Is Not Rising’, Review of African Political Economy, 43.147 (2016), 8–25. 19. Thomas A. Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998, p. 18. 20. Stephen Gray, ‘Interview with Ahmadou Kourouma’, Research in African Literatures, 32:1 (2001), 122–123 (p. 122). 21. Issac Ndlovu, ‘Freedom in Chains Versus Opulence in Chains: Satirical Exposé of the Postcolonial Dictatorships in Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote’, Theoria, 59:130 (2012), 59–86. 22. Ouédraogo, ‘An Interview with Ahmadou Kourouma’, p. 1347. 23. Ibid., p. 1348. 24. Ouédraogo, ‘Ahmadou Kourouma and Ivoirian Crises’, p. 2. 25. Ibid., p. 1342. 26. Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, ‘The Dictator and His Objects: The Status of the Fetish in the African Dictator Novel’, in Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, Unmasking the African Dictator, pp. 125–140 (p. 125). 27. Armillas-Tiseyra, ‘The Dictator and His Objects’, pp. 130–131. 28. Ibid., p. 130. 29. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin, 1990, p. 165. 30. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 191. 31. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O’Prey, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989 [1902], p. 32. 32. Armillas-Tiseyra, ‘The Dictator and His Objects’, p. 137. 33. Ibid., p. 138. 34. Christiane Ndiaye, ‘Kourouma, the Myth: The Rhetoric of the Commonplace in Kourouma Criticism’, trans. Jean Ouédraogo, Research in African Literatures, 38:2 (2007), 95–108 (p. 97). 35. On the specific effects of structural adjustment in Zaire see Steve Askin and Carole Collins, ‘External Collusion with Kleptocracy: Can Zaïre Recapture Its Stolen Wealth?’ Review of African Political Economy, 57 (1993), 72–85. A vivid account of the era is sketched in Michela Wrong’s In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo, London: Fourth Estate, 2001. 36. Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly, Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change, London: Zed Books, 2015, p. 20. 37. Ibid., p. 33. 38. Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising, p. 75.

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39. Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971, p. xiii. 40. John Updike, ‘Extended Performance’, The New Yorker, 31 July 2006, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/31/extendedperformance [accessed 3 July 2018]. 41. Martin, Journeys Through the Labyrinth, p. 266. 42. Colson, ‘Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest’, p. 134. 43. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, London: Allen Lane, 2007, p. 161. 44. Ibid., p. 150. 45. Kourouma, Allah Is Not Obliged, p. 95. 46. John Clement Ball, Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 19. 47. ‘Education and culture should not only explain the world but must prepare the recipients to change the world’. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neo-colonial Kenya, London: New Beacon, 1983, p. 99. 48. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Athlone, 1999, p. 83.

References Adorno, Theodor W. 1999. Aesthetic Theory. Ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: Athlone. Armillas-Tiseyra, Magalí. 2014. “The Dictator and His Objects: The Status of the Fetish in the African Dictator Novel.” Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature. Ed. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı. Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P, pp. 125–140. Arrighi, Giovanni. 2003. “Lineages of Empire.” Debating Empire. Ed. Gopal Balakrishnan. London: Verso, pp. 29–42. Askin, Steve and Carole Collins. 1993. “External Collusion with Kleptocracy: Can Zaïre Recapture Its Stolen Wealth?” Review of African Political Economy 57, 72–85. Banjo, Adewale. 2008. “Constitutional and Succession Crisis in West Africa: The Case of Togo.” African Journal of Legal Studies 2.2, 147–161. Branch, Adam and Zachariah Mampilly. 2015. Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. London: Zed Books. Bush, Ray. 2018. “Africa: A Political Economy of Continued Crisis.” Afrika Focus 31.2, 23–46. Chomsky, Noam. 1985. Turning the Tide: U.S. Intervention in Central America and the Struggle for Peace. Boston: South End Press.

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———. 1993. Year 501: The Conquest Continues. Boston: South End Press. Clement Ball, John. 2003. Satire and the Postcolonial Novel: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie. London: Routledge. Coates, Carrol F. 2007. “A Fictive History of Côte d’Ivoire: Kourouma and ‘Fouphouai.’” Research in African Literatures 38.2, 124–139. Colson, Robert L. 2011. “Arresting Time, Resisting Arrest: Narrative Time and the African Dictator in Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o’s Wizard of the Crow.” Research in African Literatures 42.1, 133–153. Conrad, Joseph. [1902] 1989. Heart of Darkness. Ed. Paul O’Prey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Engels, Friedrich. “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968, pp. 394–428. Friedman, Jeremy. 2015. Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P. Gray, Stephen. 2001. “Interview with Ahmadou Kourouma.” Research in African Literatures 32.1, 122–123. Hale, Thomas A. 1998. Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2001. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. Hibou, Béatrice. 1989. “The ‘Social Capital’ of the State as an Agent of Deception, or The Ruses of Economic Intelligence.” The Criminalization of the State in Africa. Ed. Jean-François Bayart, Stephen Ellis and Béatrice Hibou. Oxford: James Currey, pp. 69–113. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Allen Lane. Kourouma, Ahmadou. [2000] 2006. Allah Is Not Obliged. Trans. Frank Wynne. London: Vintage. MacDonald, Ian P. 2016. “The Cybogre Manifesto: Time, Utopia, and Globality in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow.” Research in African Literatures 47.1, 57–75. Martin, Gerald. 1989. Journeys Through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. Meiksins Wood, Ellen. 2003a. The Empire of Capital. London: Verso. ———. 2003b. “A Manifesto for Global Capitalism?” Debating Empire. Ed. Gopal Balakrishnan. London: Verso, pp. 61–82. Miliband, Ralph. 2015. Class War Conservativism. Revised edition. London: Verso. Mitchell, W.J.T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: The U of Chicago P.

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Ndiaye, Christian. 2007. “Kourouma, the Myth: The Rhetoric of the Commonplace in Kourouma Criticism.” Trans. Jean Ouédraogo. Research in African Literatures 38.2, 95–108. Ndlovu, Isaac. 2012. “Freedom in Chains versus Opulence in Chains: Satirical Exposé of the Postcolonial Dictatorships in Kourouma’s Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote.” Theoria 59.130, 59–86. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. 1983. Barrel of a Pen: Resistance to Repression in Neocolonial Kenya. London: New Beacon. Ouédraogo, Jean. 2000. “An Interview with Ahmadou Kourouma.” Callaloo 23.4, 1338–1348. ———. 2004. “Ahmadou Kourouma and Ivoirian Crises.” Research in African Literatures 35.3, 1–5. Panitch, Leo and Sam Gindin. 2012. The Making of Global Capitalism: The Political Economy of American Empire. London: Verso. Piot, Charles. 2010. Nostalgia for the Future: West Africa after the Cold War. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Poirier, Richard. 1971. The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life. Oxford: Oxford UP. Samba Sylla, Ndongo. 2014. “From a Marginalised to an Emerging Africa? A Critical Analysis.” Review of African Political Economy 41.1, 7–25. Smith, Neil. 2003. “After the American Lebensraum: “‘Empire’, Empire, and Globalization.” Interventions 5.2, 249–270. Soares De Oliveira, Ricardo M. 2007. Oil and Politics in the Gulf of Guinea. London: C. Hurst. Taylor, Ian. 2016. “Dependency Redux: Why Africa Is Not Rising.” Review of African Political Economy 43.147, 8–25. Tucker, Robert C. 1970. The Marxian Revolutionary Idea. London: George Allen & Unwin. Updike, John. 2018. “Extended Performance.” The New Yorker. https://www. newyorker.com/magazine/2006/07/31/extended-performance [accessed 3 July 2018]. Wrong, Michela. 2001. In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo. London: Fourth Estate.

CHAPTER 5

Allegories of Dictatorship in Nigerian Fiction: Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus

I want to begin this final chapter by returning (yet again) to the critical debate instigated thirty odd years ago by Fredric Jameson’s ‘national allegory’ thesis. There is a good reason for revisiting these old coals, which Neil Lazarus, Susan Andrade and others have raked over before me, not least because Jameson’s thesis still allows us to think carefully about the productive political work that gets done when African novelists allegorise larger political struggles at the micro-level of representations of the individual and of the family. That is my initial aim—to show why it is legitimate and indeed necessary to speak of two formally quite dissimilar texts about dictatorial rule in Nigeria, Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah (1987) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus (2003), as ‘national allegories’, and also to explain why the allegorical form or mode is an especially effective one for dramatising an as yet unresolved political struggle in postcolonial Nigeria. These two novels allegorise what Achebe calls ‘the great collusive swindle that was independence’.1 My main aim, once again, is to describe these texts’ representations of the stakes and the possible outcomes of a specific national struggle between the popular-democratic power promised at independence on the one hand and on the other hand the persistently © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2_5

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concentrated power of a state that acts, in the words of the Nigerian Marxist Yusufu Bala Usman, as ‘the link and intermediary between the people and the wealth of Nigeria and the international capitalist system’.2

Allegory as a Method of Reading Aijaz Ahmad’s blistering critique of Jameson’s claim that ‘all third-world texts’ are ‘national allegories’ of the third-world nation’s struggle against imperialism is well known and has been widely rehearsed. For Ahmad, Jameson was guilty of an act of crass simplification, not only of a colonialstyle effacement of the profound differences between third-world cultures and societies but also of an unthinking replication of the imperialism at the heart of the ‘three worlds’ thesis itself, which for Ahmad assumes that agency and power all belong to the first world, of which the third world is but a helpless victim. Jameson’s essay on national allegory has since been touted as a prime example of Marxism’s arrogantly totalising methods, in particular Marxism’s reputed deafness to the nuances and diversities of postcolonial texts and contexts. Pramod K. Nayar’s casually disparaging reference in his 2014 anthology of postcolonial criticism to ‘Fredric Jameson’s identikit declarations on postcolonial literature’3 is typical of these dismissals. Bill Ashcroft et al. include Ahmad’s attack on Jameson in a section of their Post-Colonial Studies Reader on ‘universality and difference’, prefaced with the tendentious statement that ‘[t]he assumption of universalism is a fundamental feature of the construction of colonial power because the ‘universal’ features of humanity are the characteristics of those who occupy positions of political dominance.’4 Then there’s Gayatri Spivak’s imperious declaration that Jameson’s essay shares with several other thinkers (including, she says, strangely, herself) ‘the tendency to assign a static ethnicity to the Other in order to locate critique or confirmation of the most sophisticated thought or act of the West’.5 In Death of a Discipline, her plea for a new way of teaching comparative literature, Spivak confusingly adds Aijaz Ahmad to Jameson (and presumably herself) on the list of ‘[p]olitically correct metropolitan multiculturalists’ who ‘want the world’s others to be identitarians’.6 There is now quite a flourishing little micro-genre of articles defending Jameson against these charges.7 Neil Lazarus has mounted the most convincing ‘defence’ of Jameson’s thesis on the grounds that for Jameson passivity and sameness is merely how the third-world appears to unsympathetic or ill-informed observers

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in the first world. The purpose of Jameson’s article, in Lazarus’ reading, is to think about how the third world has been constructed imaginatively and in practice by capitalist imperialism and about how the institutions of the third-world nation state are the principal sites at which capitalist imperialism has been both imposed and resisted.8 A further aim, then, with which Lazarus is again in sympathy, is to encourage and, via Jameson’s own dexterous readings of Lu Xun’s story ‘Diary of a Madman’ and Ousmane Sembène’s film Xala, also to read two ‘third-world’ texts in order to begin to flag up the variety of ways in which writers have dramatised such struggles over state power. I think that Lazarus is substantially correct on both points and that what Jameson’s essay actually does is restate, in a way that will be exemplary for this reading of two Nigerian novels, the distinguishing Marxist proposition that literary works’ content and form are determined in the last instance by an overbearing and as yet unfinished struggle to prevail over class and state power. Their value is their capacity to dramatise that struggle and, as I hope to show, forecast ways of resolving it. Let us remind ourselves of exactly what Jameson says: All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. Let me try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx… Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.9

Now, there is undoubtedly a lot to get one’s critical teeth into here. For a start, if ‘third-world texts’ present the nation state as a site of struggle between popular-democratic aspirations and the imperatives of global capital then something similar must also be said, though Jameson does not, here at least, about ‘first-world texts’. Their themes and forms might

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be read as allegories of political struggle in just the way that Jameson is recommending for their third-world equivalents. Indeed Jameson does go on to make exactly that point when he observes that ‘allegorical structures’ are not absent from first-world literatures. They are just, he writes, more ‘conscious and overt’ in third-world texts, due perhaps to the greater saliency of struggles over political and economic power in super-exploited societies.10 Given the similarity of these situations, then, it makes no sense for Jameson to speak crudely of ‘capitalist culture’, as if the culture of ‘the West’ alone is capitalist. It is a fact that third- and firstworld texts dramatise the perennial struggles entailed by a capitalist social and economic order. Third-world societies and their ‘cultures’ are no less ‘capitalist’ than first-world societies and cultures, in other words. Yet such qualifications do not affect the substance of Jameson’s thesis, which as I have said is nothing other than the familiar and indeed axiomatic Marxist proposition that, as Terry Eagleton in his Marxism and Literary Criticism and Theodor Adorno in his far weightier Aesthetic Theory both argue, class struggles are imprinted, more or less obliquely, on the themes and forms of literary works.11 Jameson’s own Marxism and Form described as ‘a forgotten truism’ the fact that literary forms ‘are inherently dependent for their existence on possibilities in their content, or in other words on the structure of the social experience which they use as raw material and from which they spring as artifacts.’12 So if one is inclined to agree with that claim, which it strikes me is a materialist truism indeed and the axiomatic claim of Marxist literary criticism, then it also follows that ‘the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society’, embattled specifically and continuingly by capitalist imperialism, makes it unavoidable that ‘third-world texts’, even those that appear to be about something else, are at a deeper level about that situation and, in the last analysis, about the struggle to overcome it: ‘It is clearly the most urgent task of a genuinely dialectical criticism to regain, on the occasion of a given work of art, this ultimate reality to which it corresponds.’13 Yet Ahmad rejects Jameson’s ‘national allegory’ thesis on the surprising grounds that it is far too sweeping, so sweeping in fact that Jameson’s inattention both to ‘the enormous cultural heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called Third World’14 and to the great stylistic as well as thematic diversity of the works of fiction produced there is effectively an act of imperialism: ‘one is doubly surprised at Jameson’s absolute insistence upon Difference and the relation of Otherness between the First World and the Third, and his equally insistent idea that the ‘experience’ of

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the ‘Third World’ could be contained and communicated within a single narrative form.’15 Now, I think that Ahmad is right to object to the implication in Jameson’s argument that the cultures of the ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds are somehow intrinsically different to one another, though as I’ve said I also think that this implication is inconsistent with Jameson’s central point that both first- and third-world literatures are conditioned by capitalist imperialism and by the struggles it provokes. Ahmad’s complaint that Jameson’s theoretical hypothesis about ‘all third-world texts’ being national allegories is too sweeping is more problematic. It strikes me, as it struck Lazarus, as a peculiar one for a Marxist to make.16 For a start, Jameson knows it is too sweeping; he says it is too sweeping.17 What Jameson is positing is a hypothesis that is eminently and openly, indeed enthusiastically, contestable, to use Lazarus’s apposite word for Jameson’s work: a claim that, in other words, lacks nuance and is therefore asking to be tested through further discussion and more detailed analysis.18 The sweeping nature of Jameson’s thesis shouldn’t necessarily be a problem for Ahmad. Marxist literary theory does not aspire to produce impressionistic or myopic readings of texts. To the contrary, through sensitive readings, it aims at the production of coherent and far-reaching, dare one say sweeping (or, to use the sanctioned Marxist terminology that Jameson has been instrumental in defending, systematic or totalising ), albeit of course for these very reasons also contestable, theoretical statements—about the commonalities between texts for example, and about the commonalities between texts and their contexts, which for Marxists must always include the unignorable context of persistent struggles over class and state power. Since the purpose of Marxist literary criticism and theory is to explain the relationship between texts and this overbearing and all-important context of struggle, Ahmad might just as well have criticised Jameson’s formulation, on the grounds that it does not adequately describe the formal and thematic features of ‘third-world texts’, for not being sweeping enough. I take Lazarus to be putting up a ‘defence’ of Jameson’s ‘national allegory’ thesis not only because Ahmad’s attack was ungenerous, which for me it certainly was: Jameson after all was just doing what Jameson always does (make totalising explanatory statements and thereby provoke discussion) and what, indeed, as I have just indicated, Marxist theory in a sense is for. Some of us had to write a PhD thesis on Jameson before we worked that one out! Nor does Lazarus merely regret Ahmad’s critique’s imprudence, though that critique definitely went against the

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grain of the whole enterprise of In Theory, a book which aspired in fact to defend Marxist theory from post-Cold War capitalist triumphalism. Ahmad’s critique of Jameson served to give postcolonialists both a reason to scorn Marxism in general and an excuse for ignoring the considerable resources of Jameson’s oeuvre in particular, which is unquestionably the richest body of work by any contemporary Marxist cultural theorist. Even more importantly for my purposes, I understand Lazarus to be using Jameson’s example to defend the explanatory utility of the category of totality in the study of postcolonial literatures, which is also how I wish to use it in this chapter. When Jameson states that all third-world texts are necessarily allegorical we should give due weight to that ‘necessarily’ and acknowledge that Jameson is making a materialist claim about causality. He is arguing, in other words, that since capitalist imperialism remains a general feature of the societies and economies of the supposedly postcolonial world, a proposition with which Ahmad in the rest of In Theory unquestionably agrees, and since nation states remain the principal sites on which that system is imposed and also resisted, which is another proposition that Ahmad’s study unequivocally endorses, it follows ‘necessarily’ that ‘all’ texts composed in these circumstances will deal with them in some more or less mediated way. As Imre Szeman argues, ‘the concept of national allegory introduces a model for a properly materialist approach to postcolonial texts and contexts’.19 It makes it ‘possible to consider these texts’ not as isolated or sui generis but as forms of cultural expression produced and circulated ‘within the global economic and political system that produces the third world as the third world.’20 To say that these two formally distinct novels are national allegories of the struggle at the level of the nation state between dictatorship and democracy is obviously not to argue that Nigerian fiction is somehow ‘Other’ to ‘first-world’ novels or that the ‘experience’ of postcolonial Nigerian history can be ‘contained and communicated within a single narrative form’. Rather, it is the first step towards showing the very different ways in which these texts address that gallingly persistent but in fact unignorable, because materially and institutionally embodied, context of struggle. One might agree with Jameson, as I do, that postcolonial texts in some way dramatise the related contexts of capitalist imperialism and the struggle over power at the level of the nation state without also believing that they all do so in the same way or with the same techniques or levels of directness. I don’t think Jameson believes this to be

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the case, as his nuanced readings of the very different texts of Lu Xun and Sembène show. Ever since The Political Unconscious Jameson has used the term ‘allegorical’ in a strikingly original way, to describe not so much a specific literary technique, in the way that The Pilgrim’s Progress might be described as a Biblical allegory or Animal Farm an allegory for the betrayal of the revolution by Stalin, but a versatile reading practice that is attentive to the variety of ways in which texts express or even sometimes repress what is for Marxism the common denominator or, to use Jameson’s preferred term, the unconscious of all texts produced in all hitherto existing societies, i.e. class struggle. So, Jameson is clearly not naive enough to think that all third-world texts communicate ‘experience’ ‘within a single narrative form’ or that third-world subjects, ‘we’ as Ahmad puts it, lapsing into the exclusionary categories of identity that he criticises Jameson for employing, invariably ‘narrate ourselves through a form commensurate with that ideal-type.’21 Allegory in Jameson’s oeuvre refers not so much to a ‘narrative form’ as it does to a mode of analysis, one that sets out to explain the extremely varied and often oblique ways in which texts register and express the struggles permanently underway in their social, political and economic contexts. The ‘political interpretation of literary texts’, that is, the effort to read the formal and thematic aspects of texts as symptoms of their deeper political subtexts, is not a method among other methods between which one might simply choose like items on a menu. If not the only method, it is for Jameson by far the most important and the one which all the others simply facilitate and augment. By seeing a given text as an allegory of its political subtext one should eventually be able, Jameson avers, to gain a more clear-sighted access to history or rather to History (with a big H), which for Jameson as a Marxist is always an arena of struggle. In this sense, the ‘political interpretation of literary texts’ is ‘the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation’.22 Allegory is not a form or mode, therefore, but a method of reading, a shorthand for what is for Marxist critics the method of reading, that is, the endeavours of readers and critics to use texts to see History with greater analytical and political clarity. So to say that all third-world texts are national allegories is emphatically not to say that all third-world texts are the same, let alone to say that all third-world societies are the same. It is a pithy restatement of Marxist literary theory’s axiomatic proposition that those societies still have in common, alas, the general context of capitalist imperialism and thus the existence of struggles over the possession and use of power at

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the level of the nation state, a context that critics will discover works of fiction to express sometimes openly and sometimes covertly and through a striking variety of formal devices. In short, Jameson’s thesis ought to cease to appear objectionable or illegitimate (which is not to say, of course, that it will cease to appear problematic) if we bear in mind two things. Firstly, Jameson’s claim that all third-world literary texts are national allegories is of course a generalisation, but for Marxists generalisation is actually what all theory aspires to be. Generalisations do not preclude further elaboration and the addition of greater discrimination and analytical detail. Indeed they positively require these things, invite them and make them possible. Because a claim has been stated so baldly it can then be tested, contested, extended and refined. That is what a theoretical tradition amounts to. ‘[T]hought laid out as theory’, to invoke Perry Anderson’s elegant formulation, militates against ‘lazy and inconsequential thinking’ by making general claims about systems and totalities and thereby usefully ‘exposes its own premises and logic more clearly to criticism.’23 The second reason why Jameson’s claim should not be dumped is that the agent of generalisation in his argument is clearly not Jameson himself but the capitalist world-system, the scale and reach of which Jameson’s concepts and formulations are endeavouring to capture and the as yet unbroken hegemony of which is, he suggests, dramatised and contested in works of fiction produced in the ‘third world’. In other words, Jameson is simply trying to identify a determining structural fact about the production of literature in the ‘third world’. The fairly blunt and now antiquated term ‘third world’ (antiquated not least because the nominally socialist second world has since dropped off the map) is surely intended by Jameson, for want of a better shorthand category, to delineate those regions that have been exceptionally and structurally exploited and disempowered in this way by what Jameson calls ‘multinational capitalism’. ‘To speak of ‘Third World’ societies as having suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism is,’ in Lazarus’s words, ‘to speak of their having been forced into the capitalist world-system, of their having been yoked, on the basis of conquest and political domination, into a global order predicated on inequality and exploitation.’24 The specific point that I am labouring to get across at the start of this chapter is that postcolonial Nigerian fiction must be read in precisely this way, that is, allegorically, as a series of intensely varied meditations on the struggle against economic and political domination. My readings will

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thus provide evidence to corroborate Jameson’s thesis, since I will read novels by Achebe and Adichie as reflections of and on power struggles at the level of the nation state between, on the one hand, authoritarian groups content to see Nigeria occupy the role of neo-colonial vassal and, on the other hand, democratic movements determined to democratise Nigeria and ‘delink’ it from the neo-colonial system.25 At the same time, however, my readings will hopefully add some much-needed nuance to Jameson’s bald formulation, since they will strive to give a sense of the extraordinary formal and thematic versatility of the ways in which two Nigerian novelists explore, shape and examine those contexts of struggle. One crucial question that Jameson’s essay fails to reflect on at any length is that of why such struggles must be dramatised allegorically, that is, indirectly. The fact that these novels explore the larger collective at a micro-level is not accidental, still less regrettable, since a great deal is gained politically by doing so. Both novels stress the essential relationship between national liberation and the liberation of women. In numerous ways they both construe liberation not only as an abstract and collective political programme but also as the combined result of individual initiatives and resolutions, in the process illustrating the genius and universal validity of the feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’. Furthermore, the difficult but immensely productive labour of translating insights gained from the plots’ focus on the micro-levels of individuals, families, relationships and friendships into the macro-level of the nation state is not something undertaken by the novels themselves. They are both far too inconclusive for that and their denouements do not pretend that the appalling context of class and state power has somehow been transcended. Insights into the connection between radical political change and changes in individual conduct for example and into the complex connections between political institutions, class and gender are instead left to the novels’ readers, who are thereby recruited as potential instigators of the utopian political transformations that both novels covet but which they each refrain from envisioning.

Nigeria, Under-Development and the State These novels encourage us to see Nigeria as a country in which there has been a persistent struggle since independence over political and economic power, a struggle between the concentration of that power in the hands of elites (who preside over Nigeria’s continuing subordination

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to the requirements of first-world capital) and the democratic-egalitarian dispersal of that power among hitherto subordinate social groups. Nigeria has of course been ruled periodically by dictatorships, firstly by Frederick Lugard, the British governor who created the new colony of Nigeria in 1914, then by subsequent governors who fostered regionalism and blocked elections until independence in 1960, and during the postcolonial period by a succession of coup-installed generals, from Yakubu Gowon who took charge in 1966, Murtala Muhammed and Olusegun Obasanjo in the 1970s, Muhammadu Buhari and Ibrahim Babangida in the 1980s and Sani Abacha in the 1990s. It needs to be remembered, lest dictatorship looks like a uniquely postcolonial malediction of which the British can safely wash their hands, that the period of colonial administration in Nigeria, including the country’s piecemeal conquest in the nineteenth century, the monopolistic rule of the Royal Niger Company, the murderous suppression of resistance under Lugard and the reform-baulking efforts of Lugard’s successors, was also a dictatorship, of a particularly grievous and larcenous kind. ‘British colonial administration was not any form of democracy, but a fairly naked dictatorship’, in Achebe’s unambiguous words.26 Democratic government has prevailed since Obasanjo’s election as the People’s Democratic Party candidate in 1999, a heroic achievement in many ways given the perennial economic and political problems with which all Nigerian governments have been faced, which the most shameless despots and their entourages simply exploited, which kleptocratic politicians profited from and thus exacerbated but with which even Nigeria’s most conscientious leaders have until now wrestled in vain. Those problems include a grotesquely unbalanced national economy that is still almost entirely dependent on resource extraction, is largely foreign-owned and is dependent on foreign markets. Hardly any of the capital accumulated from oil extraction finds its way into investment in health, education and public infrastructure, being instead cornered by a tiny class of rentiers in charge of contracts and licenses. These are problems substantially inherited from the colonial period. The Royal Niger Company was given concessionary powers over the Niger basin in 1886. In 1914, the year that the northern and southern ‘protectorates’ were unified as Nigeria, sub-soil minerals were made the property of the crown. The colonial authorities granted the Shell Oil Company a monopoly over oil exploration in 1938. In short, from its inception Nigeria has been a device for extracting capital. From the

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beginning of independence, during the First Republic, popular faith in democratic rule was undermined by corruption, itself a consequence of decades of political centralisation and of the scarcity of resources in a country where wealth was highly concentrated and swiftly exported. To explain the concentration of economic and political power in Nigeria in the hands of narrow rent-seeking elites one must therefore turn to Marxist theories of neo-colonialism, particularly those developed in the Nigerian context and gathered together in Adam Mayer’s outstanding study of Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria. Of course, any attempt to read Nigerian history since independence as an effort to overcome the legacy of political and economic centralisation inherited from colonialism and substantially unaltered under neo-colonialism must endeavour to explain unusually acute ethnic and regional divisions. These have been a feature of Nigerian politics since Lugard’s policy of colonial ‘indirect rule’ in the north through to the civil war of 1967–1970 and the numerous attempts since then to find a sustainable constitutional footing for the idea of a Nigerian federation. Nigeria has been as fissiparous as it has been centralised. British governors routinely set Igbo, Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba at odds with each other lest those groups set themselves at odds concertedly with the colonial authorities. Tribalism is in large part a colonial invention: the tax-collecting warrant chiefs so resented by the Igbo and in the Niger Delta were partly ‘invented by the authorities’, in Richard Bourne’s words.27 Since independence these partly imagined ethnic communities have provided real focuses for attachment and solidarity when the national polity has been contrastingly remote and at times violently repressive. Fissiparousness has therefore been a consequence of, not a barrier to, the excessive centralisation of economic and political power in postcolonial Nigeria. There have been few attempts to reverse the dependency on oil revenue that became truly entrenched after the discovery of new reserves in the Niger Delta and the central government’s victory in the civil war. Obasanjo did take British Petroleum into public ownership in 1976. But such efforts were never matched by a concerted campaign to alter fundamentally the social and economic legacies of colonialism. Indeed this failure paved the way for the disastrous entrenchment of economic dependency in the 1980s. Oil revenue fell drastically in the early years of that decade. Debts and capital flight increased, partly as a result of the austerity programme introduced under the civilian government of Shehu Shegari in 1982. This was a period of serious economic contraction across

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Africa, as we have seen. What Bourne calls ‘the most comprehensive structural adjustment programme negotiated in Africa in the 1980s’ was then imposed in the late 1980s under the military government of Babangida.28 The key volumes here are Bade Onimode’s A Future for Africa: Beyond the Politics of Adjustment and The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Nigeria edited by Adebayo O. Olukoshi.29 Olukoshi shows that from the early 1970s Nigeria experienced a decade of spectacular growth in crude petroleum exports and also, therefore, in government revenue, infrastructure investment and per capita national income at a time when most other African states were entering a period of economic stagnation. The end of the boom came with the sharp fall in the world price of oil in the early 1980s. Yet the subsequent economic crisis in Nigeria, to which the IMF and World Bank-sponsored structural adjustment programme introduced in 1986 was a failed response, should be traced, Olukoshi argues, not to price fluctuations but to what he calls ‘the lopsided character of the postcolonial development path followed by the state.’30 The colonial economy was based on cash crops and mineral production for export. Since 1945 first agricultural surpluses and then oil revenues had provided the foreign exchange necessary to sustain and expand Nigerian manufacturing. This was a conventional and moderately successful model of import-substitution industrialisation that came crashing down when the world market price for oil collapsed. These are the origins of the Nigerian debt crisis, in a government forced to borrow in order to sustain essential expenditure. What the crisis exposed, therefore, were the acute imbalances of the Nigerian economy and consequently its extreme vulnerability to external factors such as oil price fluctuations. The concentration of political power at the level of an authoritarian and repressive state in the shape of the Babangida regime, which assumed power in 1985, allowed structural adjustment to be introduced in the face of prolonged protests by workers, students and professional groups. Indeed despite the fact that IMF-mandated structural adjustment had been explicitly rejected in 1985 by a national consultation of everyone from workers to religious groups, Nigerian manufacturers and even elements of the army, the IMF’s prescriptions were imposed regardless. In exchange for limited debt rescheduling the dictatorship slashed regulations and subsidies, massively reduced public expenditure, sold off some public enterprises and starved others of investment, devalued the naira, deregulated prices, trade and the financial sector. Predictably, debt rose but foreign investment did not. It is important to observe that structural

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adjustment did not palliate but rather exacerbated the perennial problems of the over-reliance on oil and under-investment in agriculture and manufacturing. The state-imposed SAP brought about the ‘deindustrialisation’ of Nigeria, to use Mayer’s term (NM , 10). What is even more crucial to remember is that, notwithstanding the fraudulent democratic ‘reforms’ that brought into being two new SAP-friendly political parties with statesanctioned leaders and manifestoes, this was in Olukoshi’s words a period of intense political ‘struggle for popular democracy and, at the level of the state, an increasing disposition towards intolerance, authoritarianism and repression.’31 Both novels are set amidst these struggles. The assassination of Dele Giwa, the campaigning editor of the Lagos weekly Newsweek, by a letter bomb in 1986 is allegorised by the identical murder of the ‘guerrilla journalist’ Ade Coker, the editor of Eugene Achike’s anti-government newspaper in Purple Hibiscus (PH , 206), just as it is recalled by the murder of Ikem, who is a poet and editor of the government-controlled National Gazette, by the security forces in Anthills of the Savannah. The scorched earth of structural adjustment is the shared milieu of both texts, a world of social breakdown and criminality; fortified and palatial mansions alongside one-room apartments into which entire families are squeezed; the petty corruptions as well as heroic sacrifices of underor even unpaid public officials; a brain drain of highly qualified professionals to the United States; petrol shortages, blackouts and energy crises (in a country with idle refineries that exports oil while importing diesel generators); general strikes in universities whose conflicts between militant students and venal administrators make them veritable ‘microcosms’ of the state (PH , 224); and the ‘mushrooming’, as the unbendingly orthodox Catholic Eugene puts it in Purple Hibiscus, of a Pentecostalism of prosperity and individual aspiration that rapidly gains converts among the urban poor. One member of the crowd gathered to celebrate the coup at the end of Anthills proposes to Make every man, woman and child and even those them never born, make everybody collect twenty manilla each and bring to me and I go to take am go England and negotiate with IMF to bring white man back to Kangan. (AS, 213)

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This ostensibly ‘bizarre’ suggestion for ‘‘wetin we go do now’’ is in fact a brilliantly parodic vernacular conception of Nigerian history itself. The prospect of political change opened up by the coup is immediately undermined by this epigrammatic reminder of a history of dependency that brackets together the grotesquely unequal transactions of the slave trade (denominated in pre-colonial manillas), a colonialism headquartered in ‘England’, and the revitalised imperialism and permanent indebtedness inflicted by the country’s fraudulent ‘negotiations’ with the International Monetary Fund. This anonymous wag concentrates our minds on the salient fact about Nigerian independence to which both novels draw our attention—it has still not taken place. Political and economic centralisation or, put differently, state and class power, devices maintained for the purpose of accumulating wealth in the hands of largely unaccountable domestic and foreign elites, remains to be tackled.

Preparation for Praxis: Anthills of the Savannah In this chapter, I am interested not in questions of direct influence, though of course that is manifestly part of Adichie’s work’s conscious and respectful relationship with its precursor Achebe. The family resemblance between both writers’ fictional projects, more at the level of theme than form, can be put down instead to the fact that they are dramatising the same struggle between enduring forms of class and state power on the one hand and popular forms of democratic participation and emancipation on the other. Anthills of the Savannah is Achebe’s most convincing attempt to answer the aesthetic conundrum of how to find a form of the novel with which to represent popular aspirations for social and gender equality, economic redistribution and political participation. I will go on to argue, however, that the novel’s principled reluctance to pre-empt or prescribe or even portray those aspirations in detail has often been mistaken by unsympathetic critics for an endorsement of class and gender hierarchies. Purple Hibiscus asks the same question, though with a different answer. It too is an allegory of the desire for democratic empowerment, this time more overtly of Nigerian women. What is worth stressing again, however, is the fact that neither novel construes the struggle for democratic empowerment as straightforward or easily accomplished. In other words, democratic empowerment is a goal, a struggle to which these unusually multifaceted allegories potentially recruit their own readers.

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Jago Morrison argues that Achebe’s novels should be viewed in the light of his repeatedly stated convictions about the necessity of aesthetic ‘commitment’. If for a forthright Achebe ‘[a]rt for art’s sake is just another piece of deodorised dog-shit’32 and if the novelist ought therefore to assume an explicitly pedagogical role in relation to his audience then this is less because the novelist and his works should be politically partisan or prescriptive than because, as Morrison contends, Achebe construed his oeuvre as ‘a series of provocations to liberal democratic debate about the past and future of the nation.’33 A Man of the People, for example, first published in January 1966 mere hours before the military coup it was widely seen as predicting, should thus be seen as a novel that asks its readers open questions about the nature and limitations of elite politics in independent Nigeria. ‘Liberal’ might not be the best word for the democratic debates that novel aspires to instigate though. For if Chief Nanga, the government minister and ironically styled ‘man of the people’ of the title, represents the venal stratum that has inherited the colonial state from its British patrons then Odili Samalu, the novel’s first-person narrator, personifies an emergent class of university-educated professionals that may be ‘liberal’ but is also revealed to be no less supercilious, elitist and frankly misogynistic than Chief Nanga. Odili is the unselfconscious protagonist of a novel that thus refrains from hinting at a political alternative to the controlling and self-serving schemes of these equally objectionable ‘elites’. A youthful professional whose background and status calculatedly invite comparisons with his author’s (he even has ‘ambitions to write a novel about the coming of the first white men to my district’34 ), Odili is remorselessly dismissive of ‘the poor contemptible people’ (MP, 2). A self-implicating Achebe and his doppelganger-protagonist show us ‘neither a concerted political critique of the current regime, nor a redemptive vision that might point beyond it.’35 Yet this dearth of redemptive visions is not a flaw, Morrison rightly insists. The novel refrains from offering solutions because it refrains from seeking to represent the democratic (as opposed to elitist) aspirations of the popular classes whose perspectives are carefully excluded from the novel, an exclusion that the novel nonetheless draws to our attention. Thus Morrison calls A Man of the People a rousing indictment of ‘the failure of the educated bourgeoisie to constitute a functioning ‘public sphere’ in post-independence Nigeria, which might have checked and supervised the political establishment more effectively.’36

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By ‘commitment’, therefore, Achebe is not suggesting that the novelist should envision political solutions but that his work ought to ask pointed questions about what it would take to tackle the concentration of political and economic power that his work depicts. He thereby recruits his readers as participants in the essentially democratic (as opposed to elitist) task of addressing those abuses. The implied solution is radically democratic not ‘liberal’, a matter of supplanting not just of ‘checking’ or ‘supervising’ the political establishment. Indeed the best explanation of the political tasks A Man of the People sets its readers would not be taken, as Morrison suggests, from the ‘liberal’ second-generation Frankfurt School thinker Jürgen Habermas and his notion of a deliberative ‘public sphere’37 but from Habermas’s far more radical predecessor Theodor Adorno, for whom authentic aesthetic commitment is a matter of galvanising readers to overthrow the class systems that texts dramatise for us primarily in their forms: ‘Every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary.’38 It is not solely at the level of content that A Man of the People exhibits its radicalism therefore, of what this novel says or refrains from saying about the democratic solutions to the malaise of elite political manoeuvrings in the First Republic, but at the more oblique level of form, where it lampoons the old tribalists pressing for their share of the national cake (MP, 22) and the meticulously ironised vanities and blindnesses of the deracinated intelligentsia from whose viewpoint the novel is narrated. Ng˜ ug˜ı is sceptical about the decision to conclude the novel with a military intervention on the grounds that this deus ex machina represents an inadequate answer to the novel’s political question about what the alternative to the ruling ‘elite’ of corrupt chiefs and middle-class intellectuals should look like.39 I think that criticism misses the point. The novel knows and shows that it’s an inadequate answer. The flagrant inadequacy of the military ‘solution’ actually advertises the novel’s inability at this stage of Achebe’s oeuvre to find a persuasive way of stepping outside these various ruling-class viewpoints to represent or at least indicate a popular and democratic solution to the malaise. What Achebe’s oeuvre has always addressed, then, is the problem of representation, which is at once an aesthetic and a political problem. Politically, this is the problem of elected or self-appointed leaders who stand and speak for and in the place of the populace—dictators, in short.40 Aesthetically, the problem is one of finding a formal method adequate to the task of articulating or at least indicating popular aspirations for

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democratic empowerment. ‘The most indubitable feature of a revolution’, according to Trotsky’s great History of the Russian Revolution, ‘is the direct interference of the masses in historical events.’41 If the essential political task after independence is to maintain this revolutionary energy of participation and to democratise the new nation’s political and economic structures then it follows that the essential aesthetic task, which I am arguing preoccupies Achebe’s entire oeuvre, is to find ways of intimating but also, more importantly, of encouraging those kinds of radical democratic pressure. Anthills of the Savannah, which appeared in 1987, was Achebe’s first novel for over twenty years. We ought to think of it, so long as the paradox can be tolerated, as a modestly utopian text. It addresses the perennial aesthetic problem of how to place on stage the democratic aspirations of the people and not just the Olympian viewpoints and escapades of their representatives. Yet the novel, which is set in the fictional West African nation of Kangan, ruled by a Babangida-like dictator who has come to power as a result of a recent coup, does not so much solve this problem as cleverly circumvent it. By the end of the text the various elite perspectives from which it is narrated have been carefully called into question. Kangan is recognisably, in part at least, Nigeria in the aftermath of ‘the heady prosperity of the oil boom’ (AS, 88) with an authoritarian military government imposing austerity in the face of popular resistance. But the novel culminates in a suggestive and prophetic image of solidarity and collective action that encompasses different ethnic and social groups, led by a woman, in defiance of established gender norms and with an expectation of imminent and transformative political change. This image, a baptism or naming ceremony, is not so much an instance of democratic empowerment or, as Kez Okafor has argued, of revolutionary transformation but more like a cryptic augury of them.42 So, the interruption of a cabinet meeting in the first chapter by the news that a delegation of farmers has arrived in the capital from the drought-stricken province of Abazon (which previously voted against ‘His Excellency’ in a recent plebiscite to make him President for Life) is the subtle prelude to a novel that meticulously discredits elite perspectives, like A Man of the People, before investing, with more optimism than its predecessor though still very tentatively, in a resonant and prophetic image of a much more inclusive and democratic political community. The arrival of the delegation is the prompt both for the dictator’s increasing paranoia and for a realisation by his close allies and fellow graduates of

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the colonial Lord Lugard College, the Commissioner of Information Chris Oriko and the poet and newspaper editor Ikem Osodi, that they have made an enormous mistake in serving his regime. Anthills is in part, thenceforth, an exemplary and self-implicating shared effort from the different viewpoints of Chris and Ikem and, increasingly, from the even more perceptive viewpoint of Chris’s fiancée Beatrice Okoh (who is a Senior Secretary in the Ministry of Finance) to enumerate the causes of dictatorship. These contrapuntal voices, first-person testimonies or ‘witness statements’ assembled by Beatrice that cut in on the main thirdperson voice, are also an instance or anticipation of the nature of the democratic alternative to dictatorship, albeit one that takes shape at the level of the novel’s structure even while it is only tentatively countenanced at the level of its content. No political transformation takes place within the pages of the novel, for Ikem is eventually murdered by the security forces, while Chris is finally forced to flee to Abazon before he is senselessly killed by a police sergeant just as he becomes conscious of the need to disavow his elite privileges. Strikingly, as Neil ten Kortenaar notes, the ‘internal frontier between the capital Bassa and the province of Abazon’, which is also a symbolic frontier between the capital and the provinces, the elite and the people, ‘is never crossed in the novel (Chris is killed just as he is about to cross it).’43 The alternative to dictatorship takes shape not so much at the level of content or plot but in the novel’s dialogic form and in suggestive and even prophetic images or local instances of democratic practice. It is clear that these young idealists assisted or at least welcomed the military coup that brought Sam, their schoolmate and now dictator, to power, probably because, like the coup that removed Shehu Shegari from office in Nigeria in 1983, His Excellency has evidently swept away a corrupt civilian administration. The novel opens with Chris’s first-hand ‘statement’ of his disillusioning experiences as a member of the dictator’s cabinet. These are ‘farcical entries in the crazy log-book of this our ship of state’ (AS, 2). It is an extremely disenchanted account, at once very lucid and worldly but also impressionistic, cynical and politically reactionary: ‘what this country really needs is a ruthless dictator’ (AS, 3), Chris tells us, with equal parts sincerity and mischievousness. Chris’s ‘statement’ is also subtly unperceptive and therefore self-undermining. For example, he puts His Excellency’s ‘quite irrational and excessive fear of demonstrations’ (AS, 12–3) down to a timidity that ‘I have never been quite able to figure out’. It is therefore up to this unreliable witness’s readers to

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‘figure out’ the obvious fact that for a dictator this fear of demonstrations is very far from being ‘irrational’ and that it is a matter of political calculation not character. The second witness statement, by Ikem, may be similarly fluent and expressive but it too is vain and self-centred, redeemed only by its selfconsciousness about the exclusion of the poor from elite discourse and therefore, by implication, from its own highly subjective account. The country’s pampered neo-colonial elite sees the poor as stoical animals, Ikem muses: ‘The very words the white master had said in his time about the black race as a whole. Now we say them about the poor’ (AS, 40). Ikem’s rhetoric is exceedingly radical, though like his ‘crusading’ (AS, 38) and (an even bigger and smugger cliché) ‘controversial’ (AS, 46) editorials it is something of an inauthentic essay ‘in overkill’, according to Chris (AS, 38): ‘Leaders who openly looted our treasury, whose effrontery soiled our national soul’ (AS, 42) is not the language of consciousness-raising but the bombastic idiom of Romantic nationalism. For Ikem, his political commitments notwithstanding, the poor are ultimately just a bloodthirsty mob. There is a sardonic, bantering quality to his statements, a kind of flippant oscillation between provocatively cynical pronouncements (‘I believe that a budding dictator might choose models far worse than the English gentleman of leisure’ [AS, 51]) and insincere militant bombast: ‘The real danger today is from that fat, adolescent and delinquent millionaire, America, and from all those virulent, misshapen freaks like Amin and Bokassa sired on Africa by Europe’ (AS, 52). Indeed the chatty, confiding tone of both Ikem and Chris assumes readers’ familiarity with the people and events being described, subtly interpellating us in the process as members of a chummy and cloistered elite. What these two opening ‘statements’ require and subtly invite, therefore, is a critical consciousness of these perspectives’ limitations. The first part of the novel is thus a subtly unflattering portrait of an insular elite more interested in rhetorical performance than in critique and in repartee rather than authentic deliberation. Beatrice’s remark at the cocktail party at Mad Medico’s residence in chapter five that ‘‘you fellows, all three of you,’’ Chris, Ikem and the dictator ‘Sam’, ‘‘are incredibly conceited’’ is an insightful one. ‘‘The story of this country, as far as you are concerned, is the story of the three of you.’’ The stories of these conceited narrators may have so far obscured other narratives of national life, something which perceptive readers will already have realised and which is now made explicit. But where are these other stories? An ellipsis

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and a pause follow Beatrice’s statement before she invites Chris to resume his soliloquy. Even Chris is aware that other stories might be told, though he patronisingly dismisses Beatrice’s interjection just as he cannot really countenance being interrupted by other narrators of Kangan’s national life: ‘‘We tend to forget that our story is only one of twenty million stories—one tiny synoptic account. But that’s the only one I know and you are such a sweet listener as I said’’ (AS, 66–7). Chris’s final bus journey along the Great North Road as he seeks to escape the security forces after Ikem’s murder is ‘an allegorical journey through the national landscape’, as Simon Gikandi notes.44 Chris bears witness to inequality, government neglect and the total failure of the nationalist dream of a united collective. In the process he starts to revise his contemptuous views of the people and of their capacity to govern. His fatal decision to come to the aid of a young woman who is about to be raped by a police sergeant is certainly a commendable ethical act. It is also one that presumably did not require, judging from what we already know of Chris’s often self-deluded but largely upstanding character, a journey of self-discovery in order to undertake; the Chris of chapter one would have done the same thing. So Chris’s selfless and fatal act is not necessarily the culmination of a journey at the end of which he decides to put himself at the service of the people. It would be pretty tenuous to read this incident as a culminating triumph over arrogant misogyny; one might equally read it as an act of vainglorious gallantry consistent with Chris’s views of women as the weaker vessel and therefore with his indulgent and amused response to the student leader’s predatory pestering of the same woman, Adamma, on the bus. At a symbolic level it is clearly an act of martyrdom and self-sacrifice on the part of this latter-day Chris(t). So what is crucial about the incident is Chris’s unquestionable moral courage and his desire at massive personal cost to prevent the abuse of power. There is more than one way of reading this final decision therefore. Does it represent an exemplary renunciation of elite male privilege? Is it mainly a metaphor for the altruism required to make such renunciations? The novel is not providing straightforward answers at such moments but asking its readers open questions about what it would take for elite privileges to be overcome. After all it is not Chris who is the guiding consciousness of the novel but Beatrice. It is Beatrice who has assembled these various texts and statements in an attempt to make sense of events. Her own narrative commences with a report of her appearance at a soirée at the lavishly

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refurbished Presidential Retreat. She gives an admiring report of Chris’s observation that not only this palatial residence but also the ‘cathedrals of Europe, the Taj Mahal of India, the pyramids of Egypt and the stone towers of Zimbabwe were all raised on the backs of serfs, starving peasants and slaves’. This impressively radical statement is reminiscent of Brecht’s ‘Questions from a Worker Who Reads’, though it is rapidly belied by Chris’s conclusion (obediently reported in indirect narration by Beatrice) that ‘[o]ur present rulers in Africa are in every sense late-flowering medieval monarchs, even the Marxists among them’ and [p]erhaps they may even need to be that way’ (AS, 74).45 Beatrice is angered by the equally pompous opinions of the ‘American girl’ from ‘American United Press’ who lectures the room, with His Excellency’s approval, about ‘the need for the country to maintain its present (quite unpopular, needless to say) levels of foreign debt servicing’. Beatrice’s anger is occasioned not just by the arrogantly authoritarian character of the American’s tirade but by a perceived breach of etiquette on the part of this ‘outrageously familiar and domineering’ interloper. The novel’s female protagonist is outgrowing the supercilious posturing of the menfolk which is revealed at this soiree to be the obverse and complement of the American’s journalist’s high-handed guidance. ‘Our present rulers’, it seems, do not need to behave ‘in that way’. The beginning of the seventh chapter is a point of transition after which Beatrice moves to the centre of her own narrative. Previously, we now learn, she had ‘taken on the challenge of bringing together as many broken pieces of this tragic history as I could lay my hands on [but] I still could not find a way to begin’ (AS, 82). The ‘single idea or power’ (AS, 82) that allows her to write the novel we are reading, instead of just reassembling it from the opinions of eminent men, is the desire to challenge misrepresentations, in particular her own ‘unjust presentation’ by her ‘enemies’ as ambitious ‘that’s forcing me to expose my life on these pages to see if perhaps there are aspects of me I had successfully concealed even from myself’ (AS, 84). The novel is thus written and compiled from a point of view that is, unlike Ikem’s or Chris’s, exceptionally introspective and self-aware. A writer now not a ‘sweet listener’, Beatrice does not aspire to assemble a ‘synoptic account’ that drowns out Kangan’s twenty million other stories: ‘I didn’t set out to write my autobiography and I don’t want to do so. Who am I that I should inflict my story on the world?’ (AS, 87). The novel is now framed as a dialogic composite of

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multiple points of view since it is conscious that established narratives can always be contested by alternative versions. Patricia Alden has censured Anthills for what she sees as the representation of Beatrice and of Ikem’s girlfriend Elewa not as participants in political struggle but as simplistic symbols: ‘woman of the people, goddess and prophetess.’46 Women in the text, Alden insists, are bearers of children, guides to the menfolk and figures of fertility: ‘But not women as speakers, women as autonomous seekers after their own ends, women who have serious ideological differences to work out, women whose claims to authority must be disruptive.’47 Yet there is evidence to controvert this harsh judgement. For Beatrice indubitably does speak, very eloquently and insistently as the novel’s main narrator. She declares quite unequivocally for example that the view that ‘every woman wants a man to complete her is a piece of male chauvinist bullshit I had completely rejected before I knew there was anything like Women’s Lib’ (AS, 88). She also tells Ikem that ‘he has no clear role for women in his political thinking’ (AS, 91). But the way I see it is that giving women today the same role which traditional society gave them of intervening only when everything else has failed is not enough, you know, like the women in the Sembene film who pick up the spears abandoned by their defeated menfolk. It is not enough that women should be the court of last resort because the last resort is a damn sight too far and too late! (AS, 91–2)48

Even Ikem, ‘who has written a full-length novel and a play on the Women’s War of 1929 which stopped the British administration in its tracks’ (AS, 91), needs to be told this. This is an extraordinarily acute mea culpa on the part of another chronicler of Nigeria’s colonial history, Achebe himself, as well as a forceful declaration that male writers of African fiction need to work much harder to represent women with, to use Alden’s terms, compelling voices, autonomous goals, ideological differences and disruptive claims to authority. Of course one might argue that such statements are Achebe’s excessively heavy-handed attempts to refute the charge of having ‘no clear role for women in his political thinking’. The narrator’s voice certainly preaches from time to time in this novel with the zeal of Achebe’s conversion to feminism. Thus a repentant Beatrice even learns, for example, to see ‘her dry-as-dust, sanctimonious, born-again’ servant Agatha more sympathetically, ‘the narrator’s voice

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coming through and declaiming: It is now up to you women to tell us what has to be done. And Agatha is surely one of you’ (AS, 184, italics in the original). But this is the opposite allegation to the one made by Alden, which is not that women speak too obviously or didactically about their oppression but that women don’t speak at all in the novel. Anthills should be seen instead, in my view, as an achieved example of a female character and narrator speaking in ways that at first subtly undercut but then explicitly controvert the presumption that the nation can be spoken for by its arrogant male leaders. In the weeks after Chris’s death and the military coup in which His Excellency is ‘tortured, shot in the head and buried under one foot of soil in the bush’ (AS, 219), Beatrice’s flat becomes a home and meeting place for an embryonic community of characters who personify or rather, in a rather more sketchy and extemporaneous way than that word implies, in some measure represent or at least signify a community formed from different elements of Nigerian society: Beatrice, Elewa, the taxi driver Braimoh, the dissident army officer Captain Abdul Medani and the student leader Emmanuel. This is by no means an idealised collective. There are ‘collisions’ as well as ‘spirited conversations and even debates’ (AS, 219) between student leader and army officer. A grief-stricken Beatrice is preoccupied with the uncertain meanings of Chris’s and Ikem’s deaths. She wonders whether rather than being ‘just another stranger who chanced upon death on the Great North Road’ or just ‘an early victim of a waxing police state’, Chris and Ikem were ‘in fact trailed travellers whose journeys from start to finish had been carefully programmed in advance by an alienated history?’ (AS, 220). That crucial question is left unanswered by a novel that seems acutely self-conscious at this moment about the sense of predestination in its own meticulously programmed plot. The novel concludes by asking very insistently but also rhetorically how ‘‘a people’’ might break out of a seemingly pre-programmed and unending history that is both ‘‘embittered’’ and ‘‘alienated’’. How might a people and not just these particular people diverge intentionally from an embittering or disillusioning history that inflicts alienation in every sense of that term: alienation from one’s culture of course (which is tempered by the respectful adaptation of tradition in this final scene) but also alienation in a more conventionally Marxist understanding of the word, from the products of one’s labour, from the many-sided creative potentialities of human nature and from the pleasures and solidarities of collective life?

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We would be quite mistaken to think that the novel concludes on a note of resolution therefore. Granted, the naming ceremony represents a reconciliation of ethnic divisions as well as a state of harmony between different religious traditions, an ‘ecumenical fraternization’ (AS, 224) no less. It is also an image of solidarity and futurity. Crucially, however, the final images are of process, conflict and struggle. The child will be named Amaechina, which means ‘May-the-path-never-close’, thus evoking the possibility but not the inevitability of political or historical progress while also leaving teasingly unclear the nature of that progress. Nor is this a familiar and hackneyed image of patrilineal succession that reinforces gender norms and in which the child herself is reduced to a flat symbol of innocence and promise. Ikem is dead of course so he will not perform the traditional function of naming the child, a role played here by the whole gathering. ‘Tradition’ is declared to be partly ‘faulty’ and revisable; Amaechina, after all, is a boy’s name. Ideas and practices must ceaselessly be re-examined, a lesson of Ikem’s ‘meditation’ and his writings, as Emmanuel reminds the gathering: ‘‘we may accept a limitation on our actions but never, under no circumstances, must we accept restriction on our thinking’’ (AS, 223). Elewa’s uncle performs the kolanut ritual, an Igbo ceremony of course, though here an unorthodox and spontaneously adapted one that becomes more inclusive as a result since women interject and since Abdul, who is a Muslim, is also present. Elewa’s uncle is delighted by these modifications and by the baby’s name, ‘‘laughing because in you young people our world has met its match’’ (AS, 227). The point is that while this ceremony anticipates a transformed future it does so by consecrating a community that will continue to dispute ‘the world’ of established norms. I cannot agree with Morrison’s view that ‘tribalism’ is the ‘fundamental problematic’ that is brought into focus at the end of Anthills.49 Rather it seems to me that the end of the novel focuses with greater insistence on class or, more precisely, on the persistently hierarchical nature of the political and economic dispensation to which Nigeria’s postcolonial travails can be traced and of which so-called tribalism is but a consequence and a symptom. After their guests have left, Beatrice explains to Emmanuel that Chris’s last words were not ‘The Last Grin’ (AS, 216) but ‘The last green’ (AS, 231), as in ‘the last green bottle’ hanging on the wall before it accidentally falls. For once it is an English nursery rhyme not an Igbo proverb that forms an image for decipherment or, as Beatrice puts it, a ‘‘message to beware’’: ‘‘This world belongs to the people of the world not

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to any little caucus, no matter how talented…’’ (AS, 232) or, Emmanuel quickly adds, talentless. As Emmanuel observes, this is essentially ‘‘the same message Elewa’s uncle was drumming out this afternoon’’ in the kola nut ritual: that those to whom the world belongs, those, in other words, who will be the agents of future transformation, are the young people gathered around Beatrice allied to ‘‘people like that old man’’, an alliance to which they are all now pledged. Elewa’s uncle has told them that ‘[h]e had never been inside a whiteman house like this before’’. This is an image not of a defeated tribalism but of achieved social equality in which there are no green bottles hanging on the wall, in which a riddle bequeathed by the British has finally been deciphered and the ‘whiteman house’ of colonial power relations has finally been occupied. The novel implores but certainly does not exhaust, or itself claim to undertake, the political action required to address this fundamental problematic. The text itself is allegorical, after all. Its cultural, linguistic and geographical references may be mostly Igbo ones, but Kangan is not Igboland or even Nigeria, as Kortenaar shows.50 It is any postcolonial African state in which the overhaul of self-serving political and economic ‘elites’ remains the essential question posed by literary texts and enjoined by political movements. I am not convinced, therefore, that Elleke Boehmer strikes the right note when she suggests that the ‘tentative new vision’51 of reconfigured gender relations and of cross-class solidarities embodied by Beatrice’s collective at the end of the novel is still ‘highly exclusive’52 and that Achebe therefore remains committed to a model of top-down political leadership. Nor do I agree that this ad hoc ‘non-sectional elite’53 offers an unconvincing because merely ‘imaginary’ (as opposed to ‘practical’54 ) resolution of the novel’s political questions about the alternative to dictatorial power. What would a non-imaginary resolution of those questions even look like in the pages of a novel? It seems a little harsh to criticise a novel for being ‘imaginary’ rather than ‘practical’. Again, I see the tentativeness and inconclusiveness of this embryonic community as an aspect of the novel’s strength and political utility and not as evidence of a failure on Achebe’s part to overcome misogyny or ‘cynicism’. Granted, the naming rite is a ‘symbol’, a purely ‘metaphoric’ rather than actual ‘redemption’ of class and ethnic divisions. But one can hardly criticise a work of literature for containing symbols any more than one can criticise it for containing words! The pertinent question is: what does the symbol denote? To my mind, it is an image of women’s empowerment,

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incipient of course and necessarily incomplete but nonetheless auspicious. Something similar might be said of the mythic interlude of chapter eight in which Beatrice is likened to Idemili, the deity of fertility and water (AS, 102–5). Again, this is a cryptic and open-ended metaphor of female power. Ikem scorns the ‘chauvinism’ required to turn his spouse into the very Mother of God, to pick her up from right under his foot where she’d been since creation and carry her reverently to a nice, corner pedestal. Up there, her feet completely off the ground she will be just as irrelevant to the practical decisions of running the world as she was in the bad old days. (AS, 98)

‘I can’t tell you what the new role for Woman will be’, Ikem announces, assuming wrongly that there will be just one role for one type of woman (with a portentous capital ‘W’). He continues more promisingly, confessing his and the novel’s ignorance about what forms women’s political activity takes: ‘I don’t know. I should never have presumed to know. You have to tell us. We never asked you before’ (AS, 98). These are acutely self-conscious meditations on the novel’s unwillingness to speak for its female characters or reduce them to lifeless symbols of purity and maternal solicitude. Beatrice is no doubt a symbol—for how could she not be?—but my point is that she is a complex and multifaceted symbol that the novel refuses to decipher on readers’ behalf. Beatrice is not ‘a full political actor’, objects Boehmer.55 But what are higher education, a professional career and the questioning of cultural tradition if not representations of full political actions? It is true that Beatrice does not join a political party or foment a revolution but there is nothing in the novel to suggest that she won’t do so! The final scene is more like a careful indication of the terms in which political community has to be rethought (involving reconfigured gender relations and new solidarities within and between marginalised social classes) not an achieved example of that rethinking or, still less plausible, a detailed portrait of a political community that has been successfully reformed along these lines. A definitive reckoning with class and gender inequalities is presented, necessarily and inescapably and I think very auspiciously, as a practical political task not an achieved reality. As Gikandi has observed, Achebe’s novel is ‘calling attention to the need for his readers to look beyond the narrated events, which are grim

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and pessimistic, towards the future of renewal and rebirth suggested at the end of the novel.’56 It is therefore vital to acknowledge the cryptic and inconclusive nature of these final scenes and images. A weakness of many readings of Anthills is that they assume it to be a realist text and even a straightforward conduit for its author’s views, a sort of fictionalised version of The Trouble with Nigeria, the political tract Achebe published in 1981 at the time of his involvement in the leftist People’s Redemption Party, rather than a novel, the language, imagery and characters of which must be approached interpretatively not literally. The smidgen of political hope that remains by the end of the novel, at which point the dictator but certainly not the dictatorship has been overthrown by a military coup, is invested in this improvised gathering and, crucially, in what the gathering might represent for readers prepared to reflect further on what it is that makes these concluding scenes so subtly auspicious. Whatever understandable misgivings critics might have about the representation of women in the text, for example, it ought to be remembered that the end of the text does not represent the novel’s or Achebe’s definitive or authoritative statement about such matters. I would go so far as to say that even those critics who still object to the representation of women at the end of Anthills are in a sense inadvertently vindicating the novel by demonstrating its ability to instigate an open discussion about the meaning and shape of a comprehensive political liberation in postcolonial Nigeria that encompasses, in Achebe’s words, ‘the peasantry, the workers, the women—the people. At the end of Anthills of the Savannah there is a kind of groping towards this reality.’57 The strikingly radical objective of the novel is to assert the necessity of overpowering corruption, dependency and authoritarianism with the aid of a democratic counter-movement. The prime feature of this government began also to take on a clearer meaning for [Ikem]. It can’t be the massive corruption though its scale and pervasiveness are truly intolerable; it isn’t the subservience to foreign manipulation, degrading as it is; it isn’t even this second-class hand-medown capitalism, ludicrous and doomed; nor is it the damnable shooting of striking railway-workers and demonstrating students and the destruction and banning thereafter of independent unions and cooperatives. It is the failure of our rulers to re-establish vital inner links with the poor and dispossessed of this country, with the bruised heart that throbs painfully at the core of the nation’s being. (AS, 141)

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Switching abruptly into a forceful present tense, this is either an emphatic statement of authorial intent or (more likely in the context of a passage that does this repeatedly) a modulation of the main narrator’s voice, via free indirect discourse, into Ikem’s own newly radical and self-questioning idiom. Either way, it is an announcement of a problem and not a prescription of a solution. What solidarity might involve and how a transformed community might be brought about are questions that the novel leaves unanswered because in the final analysis it cannot answer them and can often only ask them in ways that sound clichéd and unconvincing, as when the main narrator reports, in Ikem’s own naïvely romantic idiom, a ‘yearning without very clear definition, to connect his essence with earth and earth’s people’ (AS, 140–1). I disagree with M.S.C. Okolo’s view that Ikem ‘embodies the message of Achebe’s ideology’.58 Ikem is not a mouthpiece. For Okolo, ‘the singular attention on the elite discourages the political participation of other classes which is, in fact, a basic consideration in achieving genuine liberation in a democratic setting.’59 But the perspectives of this elite are painstakingly discredited in the course of the novel precisely because the novel, which does not contain any fully elaborated programme for political change, recognises that ‘genuine liberation’ can only be genuine if it emanates from those ‘other classes’ through democratic as opposed to elite political action. ‘Earth’s people’ and ‘the nation’s being’ with its painfully thudding ‘bruised heart’ are clearly and indeed flagrantly inadequate ways of naming the democratic counter-movement that the novel craves but that as yet lacks clear definition. Of course the novel’s titular image, of the termites’ earthworks exposed amidst the burnt vegetation of the dry season, is not one of revolution but of survival and resilience. The necessity of a democratic counter-movement that encompasses the entire national community and can only be intimated by the novel rather than represented directly is an insight that the protagonists are merely ‘groping towards’. It is a possibility not yet an actuality, one that, like the anthills, they must patiently await and prepare for. For David Richards the ‘principal subject’ of the text is ‘the nature of narrative in an age of oppression.’60 It is, ‘in part, an essentially optimistic manifesto of the power of ‘the literary’ in all its variety and humanistic potential to offer an alternative epistemology to that of the state, another constellation of meaning and an arena for the outlawed disputation of political ideologies.’61 The telling of stories and especially the telling of multiple stories, in addition to the telling of the same story

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from multiple points of view, transforms what purport to be unpropitious narratives of failure and defeat into bold anticipations of a democraticegalitarian future. The novel is full of cryptic and inconclusive stories, such as the stories told by the delegation from Abazon, the colourful legends inscribed on the bus that takes Chris and Emmanuel northwards which are described as ‘cryptic scripture’ (AS, 203), the impressionistic witness statements of the protagonists, as well as Ikem’s hymn to the sun, an ‘unsigned’ poem that reveals new layers of meaning to Chris as he reads it again on the bus journey. Imaginative fictions work in a different way to, for example, the ‘crusading editorials’ that Ikem boasts about but which Chris suspects ‘are essays in overkill’ and therefore ‘achieve nothing’ (AS, 38). The delegation from Abazon that tells its own story of the drought is an example of the democratic sensibility, autonomous initiative and desire for collective political action that have been substantially evacuated from the state itself. One of the elders tells Ikem that stories become multiply meaningful by outlasting the events they portray and the intentions of their original tellers: ‘It is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums and the exploits of brave fighters’ (AS, 124). Stories are salutary, according to this acutely self-conscious novel replete with instances and images of storytelling, because they invite and even beseech retellings. As Robin Ikegami has argued in an important reading, storytelling is presented in the novel as an intrinsically political act. But ‘these stories are not seen as sources of solutions to problems; no one views them as coherent wholes that offer reassurance or advice.’62 Indeed Ikem’s combative lecture at the University of Bassa is just such a model of disobliging and therefore rousingly provocative rhetoric. His aim is to challenge the students’ ‘stereotype notions of struggle’ (AS, 153). The main narrator dubs it ‘an epic prose-poem’. Ikem introduces it as a ‘meditation’ rather than a lecture, a story about the fable of ‘The Tortoise and the Leopard’ told to him by the old man from the Abazonian delegation who is now behind bars. Why? I hear you ask. Very well… This is why… Because storytellers are a threat. They threaten all champions of control, they frighten usurpers of the right-to-freedom of the human spirit—in state, in church or mosque, in party congress, in the university or wherever. That’s why. (AS, 153)

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We do not hear Ikem’s meditation but we are witnesses to the ‘dialogue’ and ‘hand-to-hand struggle’ that follow (AS, 154). The salutary aim of Ikem’s retorts to the students’ questions is to provoke reflection on uncritical beliefs and one-sided preconceptions. ‘Wherever his audience is, he must try not to be. If they fancy themselves radical, he fancies himself conservative; if they propound right-wing tenets he unleashes revolution!’ (AS, 154). Far from being just a contrarian or devil’s advocate, however, Ikem is a radical agitator who aims not only to provoke critique and democratic deliberation but to espouse them as essential principles and political goals. A couple of months previously he had been ejected from the Bassa Rotary Club after informing the complacent businessmen that charity ‘is the opium of the privileged’ (AS, 155): ‘the real solution lies in a world in which charity will have become unnecessary’ (AS, 155). Ikem is now, entirely consistently, rebuking a faux radical questioner’s belief that a ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat’ is needed to correct the ‘manifest failures of bourgeois reformism’ in the ‘Third World’ (AS, 155). The audience is chastised for aspiring to make a revolution in the name of the workers, whom Ikem provocatively alleges are among the most privileged and poorly led groups in the nation, and of peasants and market women, none of whom, Ikem observes, are in the hall to speak for themselves. Ikem’s ‘meditation’ takes aim at ‘dictatorships’ of all stripes. He propounds a ‘radicalism’ that does not just ‘heap all our problems on the doorstep of capitalism and imperialism’, powerful ‘external factors’ though they both are, but also ‘widen[s] the scope of… self-examination’ (AS, 158) and incites scepticism towards self-appointed leaders and pedagogues. When the pompous ‘sociologist of literature’ opines that ‘writers in the Third World context must not stop at the stage of documenting social problems but move to the higher responsibility of proffering prescriptions’ Ikem’s response, in which we can surely hear Achebe’s own position in the perennial debate about political commitment in postcolonial African fiction, articulates the novel’s own conception of itself: ‘‘Writers don’t give prescriptions,’ shouted Ikem. ‘They give headaches!’’ (AS, 161). We should construe Achebe’s oeuvre as just such a sustained meditation, to use Ikem’s word once more, on political revolution. Since Ikem savagely mocks the revolutionary affectations of the university’s undergraduates it might be still more accurate to describe Achebe’s works as increasingly perceptive and self-conscious meditations on the extremely laborious and extensive ethical and political work (a long revolution no

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less, to invoke Raymond Williams’s term63 ) that would be required to effect a substantial transformation of Nigeria’s arrested decolonisation. As Ikem puts it, ‘‘progress in freedom will be piecemeal, slow and undramatic’’ (AS, 99). Are Achebe’s novels also meditations on political leadership? ‘The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership’, is the celebrated first line of The Trouble with Nigeria. ‘The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal example which are the hallmarks of true leadership.’64 Hampered initially by Britain’s cynical bequest of political and economic power to ‘that conservative element in the country that had played no real part in the struggle for independence’, Nigeria has since been ‘plagued’, according to Achebe’s ‘personal history’ of the civil war, ‘by a home-grown enemy: the political ineptitude, mediocrity, indiscipline, ethnic bigotry, and corruption of the ruling class.’65 There is no doubt that for Achebe part of the solution to the wrong turns and betrayals effected by these nefarious rulers is simply better rulers. Principled and even visionary leadership is an essential aspect of any comprehensive political transformation. Therefore, as he puts it, ‘Africa’s postcolonial disposition is the result of a people who have lost the habit of ruling themselves.’66 Yet it is not as though Achebe envisages a way out of this disposition being indicated by a kind of vanguard whose task it is to implant some sort of advanced consciousness in the subservient masses. A resumed or relearned habit of self-rule is something that all Nigerians (and not only Nigerians of course) must cultivate, Achebe is arguing, if the country is ‘to liberate itself anew’.67 Political transformation is thus visualised by Achebe as the shared work of leaders and activists, the former providing direction and guidance while the latter bring the energy and intelligence as well as the incentive required to assemble alternatives to the authoritarian systems of government that have characterised the colonial and postcolonial dispensations alike. This is a model of political leadership described most compellingly by Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth: [W]e often believe with criminal superficiality that to educate the masses politically is to deliver a long political harangue from time to time. We think that it is enough that the leader or one of his lieutenants should speak in a pompous tone about the principle events of the day for them to have fulfilled this bounden duty to educate the masses politically. Now, political education means opening their minds, awakening them, and allowing

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the birth of their intelligence; as Césaire said, it is ‘to invent souls’. To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people. (WoE, 159)

True leadership, then, in Achebe’s understanding of it and also in Fanon’s, would not mean abusing positions of power or using them as soapboxes to issue and enforce self-serving edicts. To the contrary, effective leadership in the context of a people striving to emancipate themselves from the authoritarian legacies of colonial power requires the relentless excoriation of the dogma that leadership is the preserve of minorities and elites. ‘If so heavy a weight of responsibility lies with the leaders’ in Achebe’s estimation, asks David A. Maughan Brown, ‘it cannot also lie with the led.’68 But why not? Maughan Brown could not be further from the truth, in my opinion, when he states that Anthills is in thrall to an ‘ideology of leadership’ and that in Achebe’s ‘fundamentally undemocratic’ view what Nigeria requires is a mere ‘change in leadership style.’69 To publicise Ikem’s abduction by the sinister State Research Council, Chris must alert foreign news agencies and exploit ‘the enormous potential of that great network nicknamed VOR, the Voice of Rumour, the despair of tyrants and shady dealers in high places’ (AS, 168). Himself a ‘shady dealer in high places’, Chris must place his trust in uninhibited popular deliberation, which is what the novel ultimately aims to provoke. In the end that is what true leadership is. The goal of Anthills is to emancipate all Nigerians, especially those Achebe calls ‘the real victims of our callous system, the wretched of the earth’, not by prescribing solutions or programmes but by painting egalitarian visions and instilling democratic practices.70 We should say instead therefore, with deference to his conviction that the novelist is a kind of teacher, that Anthills is a constructive meditation on political education. It puts us to school in the process of democratic transformation.

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Training for Democratic Citizenship: Purple Hibiscus The tyranny exerted by Eugene Achike or ‘Papa’ over his family in Purple Hibiscus is clearly a figure for the Buhari and Abacha dictatorships. But Eugene is also an apparent enemy of the regime, the recipient of a ‘human rights award’ (PH , 5) and the publisher of a campaigning democratic newspaper. He is evidently not a member of the new ruling class of soldiers, spivs and speculators that assumed power in the era of structural adjustment. Nor does he appear to be a bankroller or even just a member of any particular political party. A manufacturer of comestibles such as biscuits and beverages that he expects his cowed offspring to praise uncritically at the dinner table, he is an archetype perhaps of the now superseded import-substitution model of industrialisation. Eugene may even be a member of the Manufacturers’ Association of Nigeria, many of whose members resisted the dictatorship and the punitive conditionalities of structural adjustment. Similarly, his sister Ifeoma’s struggles with the venal and authoritarian university bureaucracy at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka are a reminder of the radicalised milieu of Nigerian higher education in this period and specifically of the central role played by the Academic Staff Union of Universities in protesting against what Attahiru Jega has called ‘the gross underfunding of the university sector occasioned by SAP; the deterioration of conditions of service of staff; the attack on university autonomy; the threat of retrenchment of staff and increasing arbitrariness of university authorities’.71 The ‘watery’ new drinks that his family are compelled to sample ‘had the same fadedlooking labels as every other thing Papa’s factories made’ (PH , 12), this insipid liquid being no match for the black gold now sustaining Nigeria’s new elites. In Purple Hibiscus Nigeria is no longer a country of factories and universities but of rigs and drilling wells. Eugene is a representative of the now embattled and superannuated class of Nigerian manufacturers, while Ifeoma is an example of the brain drain to the West of the Nigerian intelligentsia. Though it invites analogies between domestic tyranny and tyranny at the level of the nation state, Purple Hibiscus nonetheless discourages us from identifying any simplistic or straightforward allegorical correspondence between the private and public spheres. It is the kind of fiction that requires, in Susan Andrade’s terms, ‘that we perceive the simultaneous production of both literal and allegorical meaning: family

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does not disappear so that the glory or pathos of nation might be revealed.’72 So, the novel both invites and resists allegorical readings or rather it insists that readers’ efforts to connect the microcosms of the family and the household allegorically to the macrocosm of the state should not be too hasty or crude. The narrative of Purple Hibiscus is not just a figure for something else then, a kind of fleetingly visited way station on the path to a clearer understanding of national politics, which in fact need to be understood through the complex events and characters of the novel. Political socialisation, the cultivation (a key term in the novel, as we shall see) of political values and political subjectivities, takes place at the level of civil society (in Gramsci’s sense of those institutions that exist outside the state), the most important of which in Purple Hibiscus is the family. The novel, in other words, is about what it appears to be about, the inconclusive struggle of its narrator-protagonist Kambili (and her brother Jaja) to defy their father’s tyranny, to speak in their own voices and to control their own destinies. It works at two levels simultaneously therefore, exploring both the individual and the family on one level and, more indirectly or allegorically, the relations of individuals, genders and classes at a national level. Purple Hibiscus is both Bildungsroman and allegory, in short. Indeed it is a particular kind of Bildungsroman because the Bildung or development that it narrates is unfinished. Adichie’s Kambili has not grown to maturity by the end of this text, not least because the meanings of maturity and development are contested. As Franco Moretti has argued, the Bildungsroman is one of ‘the most contradictory of modern symbolic forms’,73 since it stages a process of both individualisation and socialisation or, put differently, of emancipation and adjustment. More often than not it narrates the extreme difficulties of socialisation or even the protagonist’s socialisation in unexpected and radical ways.74 What Purple Hibiscus portrays at the individual level is a painful and very gradual and by the end of the novel still incomplete acquisition by Kambili of what Hannah Arendt characterises as the distinguishing political aptitudes of critique, defiance and eloquent speech. These qualities are also presented at the text’s allegorical level as aptitudes required of citizens in their efforts to democratise the institutions of the state. Andrade compares Purple Hibiscus to Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), the celebrated Zimbabwean Bildungsroman that also questions orthodox narratives of individual and national development and that allegorises the national without sacrificing a sense of the vital

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importance of the individual and the familial. In Dangarembga’s novel there are only two references in the course of Tambu’s narration of her fraught and incomplete Bildung to the largely hidden context of Rhodesia’s racist minority regime’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 and the subsequent protracted war of liberation.75 Andrade is surely right that this reticence is less an evasion and still less a denial of the importance of this national backdrop than it is a consequence of both novels’ determination to expose and reprehend the exclusion of women from the discourse and practice of nationalist politics. The specific events of each Bildungsroman do not need to be imbued with extra significance by reading them too hastily or reductively as figures for the equally conflicted and inconclusive development of the nation states of Nigeria and Zimbabwe. Both novels are undoubtedly allegories, Andrade is suggesting, but they are not the kind of allegory that encourages readers to pass quickly beyond event and character to some allegedly more profound deep-level meanings. Tambu’s and Kambili’s ‘private individual destinies’, to use Jameson’s phrase, are in part just that: private individual destinies. The suffering and defiant bodies of these young women are not trite symbols for the national collective. The oppression of women is not a figure for something else but a supremely important problem in its own right. These works therefore stress the political significance of the selfemancipation of women for all liberationist projects or, as Tambu puts it in Nervous Conditions, ‘the way all the conflicts came back to this question of femaleness. Femaleness as opposed and inferior to maleness’ (NC, 118). So, both novels are national allegories, but certainly not because their female protagonists are symbols of the nation, as though ‘the nation’ was anything other than its citizens (including its female citizens obviously) and as though national liberation means anything at all, let alone anything worthwhile, if the self-emancipation of women is not installed as a central and indispensable aspect of its prospectus. To speak of Purple Hibiscus as a national allegory, then, is emphatically not to present the novel as an allegory in the simplistic sense whereby particular characters symbolise larger entities or social groups and particular incidents represent identifiable historical events. Rather, our aim should be to treat it as a novel that shuttles between its two levels, the realist and the allegorical, the private and the public, the domestic and the national, in such complicated and intriguing ways that these crude oppositions no longer hold. One of the most important things the novel teaches us is that the

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aptitudes painstakingly acquired by Kambili at the level of the domestic— including the ability to express her needs and desires, to act in defiance of authority and to question the various doctrines with which her father justifies his dominance—are also attributes sorely required at the public level of political struggles over the wielding of state power. Indeed forms of conscious and active citizenship, often practised and acquired as we shall see at the level of civil society institutions such as the family, the Church and the university, are the indispensable content of the otherwise merely abstract form of democracy. Kambili’s halting and inconclusive personal development really is an allegorical depiction of the nation state itself, but only insofar as the nation state is the stage of an unfinished struggle to ensure the political and other rights of women and to develop ways of combatting dependency and dictatorial power with democratic aptitudes and institutions. To come to the point, Purple Hibiscus is an incomplete Bildungsroman in which the protagonist’s ongoing struggle to speak, to overcome the voicelessness imposed by the domestic tyranny of her father, also invites readers to draw comparisons with the similarly unrealised goal of Nigerian history itself, a century-long effort to overcome the legacies and actualities of centralised political and economic power through the achievement of radically democratic forms of organisation. To quote Andrade once more, the novel asks ‘whether and how Nigeria and Nigerians can live together democratically in a nondictatorial political system.’76 My main aim in this section is to put some flesh on the bare bones of that claim. I want to spell out in more detail the ideal of democratic deliberation to which the novel strives. The novel doesn’t tell us explicitly that criticality, defiance and eloquence are the essential aptitudes of democratic practice, requiring general cultivation and application at the public levels of citizenship and government as well as the private level of the family. It leaves its readers to work out these connections between the private and the public worlds, which are almost always more difficult to trace than Jameson lets on when he suggests that third-world texts wear their politics on their sleeve, as it were, and that they narrate quite openly the ‘destiny’ of national liberation. One problem here is the word ‘destiny’, since it implies that the struggle described and enacted in ‘third-world texts’ is a straightforward one, the outcome of which has been foreordained and can be easily made out. Indeed Jameson’s politics are forcefully eschatological: ‘all literature must be read as a symbolic meditation on the destiny of community’, he tells us. The history that all texts allegorise,

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for Jameson, is a ‘single vast unfinished plot’ or ‘single great collective story’, ‘the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity’.77 But ‘destiny’ and ‘struggle’ are not quite the same things. The outcome of the political struggle allegorised by Adichie’s novel is by no means foreordained. This is a novel about struggle therefore, one that is radically misrepresented when it is read, as Madelaine Hron’s account of ‘the figure of the child in third-generation Nigerian novels’ reads it, as a novel about ‘hybridity’. This is the default mode of a certain strain of postcolonial criticism of course, identified and bemoaned on several occasions by Benita Parry, which is always to look for a ‘binary’ and then announce that it has been ‘hybridised’.78 Real struggles over power are frequently obfuscated by this kind of predictable and undiscriminating critical practice and by an emollient idiom preoccupied with ‘revaluating and renegotiating’ ‘oppositional binaries’ between, for example, ‘Western and traditional values, between urban and rural settings, or between public and private spheres.’79 We require a much more politicised vocabulary of struggle if we are to conceptualise adequately the exemplary critical and democratic sensibility that Kambili begins to assume in the course of this novel. It is the aptitudes of good citizenship that Kambili is acquiring or perhaps of a kind of bad or even potentially revolutionary citizenship since they might enable a radical confrontation with the dictatorial state. And a ‘form of global ethics’ is definitely too vague and depoliticised a goal for a transformed Nigerian state to aim at if it is to ‘renegotiate’ its relations to ‘global capital’ and in the process wrestle with ‘such issues as economic disparity, social justice, and human rights.’80 Eugene’s dictatorial power is presented in the novel as an inheritance of colonialism. He is a product of a missionary school. Eugene insists that the children speak English rather than Igbo and ‘sound civilised in public.’ Aunty Ifeoma ‘said once that Papa was too much of a colonial product’ (PH , 13). The novel consists of a detailed description of the events leading up to Eugene’s enraged response to his son Jaja’s refusal to attend communion on Palm Sunday, the incident with which it begins. Bodies are remorselessly punished and disciplined by, for example, meticulously planned work schedules, the initiatory ‘love sips’ of Eugene’s scalding tea, the horrific assaults on his wife Beatrice, the pouring of boiling water on the children’s feet in punishment for less-than-perfect exam results and finally the vicious beating of both Beatrice (that causes her to miscarry) and of Kambili after she is found with her cousin Amaka’s

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drawing of their ‘pagan’ grandfather. The excruciating scenes of psychological abuse and physical torture are illustrations of the manifold violence of a power that the novel invites us to see as in some sense ‘a colonial product’ and to which Eugene’s victims develop various forms of resistance. As well as a protracted explanation of her brother’s rebelliousness, the narrative itself is also an enactment of Kambili’s own gradual acquisition of a disobedient and articulate sensibility, which will then be imbued with a slightly more political dimension in the novel’s present-tense coda. This is a novel preoccupied with civil institutions of various kinds that are frequently appropriated by the state but that might also help to incubate democratic sympathies and practices. The University of Nigeria at Nsukka is one such institution. The university has lately been made into a ‘‘microcosm of the country’’, as Kambili’s cousin Obiora observes, ruled by a ‘sole administrator’, ‘‘The university’s equivalent of a head of state’’ (PH , 224). This is a starkly dramatised epoch in which higher education in postcolonial Nigeria, tasked at independence with advancing the goal of an independent and democratic form of development, has been wilfully hamstrung by swingeing wage cuts, the summary firing of radical or merely conscientious teachers and a steady brain drain of disaffected lecturers to the United States. Students either riot and protest in the face of the incompetence and cupidity of the university’s leaders or else, like Aunty Ifeomoa’s female undergraduates, they despair of professional advancement and settle instead for advantageous marriages. The family is another such battleground. Ifeoma’s is extremely boisterous and egalitarian. She speaks ‘as if to get as many words out of her mouth as she could in the shortest time’ (PH , 71). Her family and their raucous little flat in Nsukka represent a more democratic alternative to the silence and abuse perpetrated under Eugene’s roof. Whereas Eugene’s family offer obsequious praise of the products from his factory, his niece offers a casual critique of the excessively sweet beverages: ‘I wondered how Amaka did it, how she opened her mouth and had words flow easily out’ (PH , 99). If they spoke ‘with a purpose back home’, that purpose being to mollify their father, ‘my cousins seemed to simply speak and speak and speak’ (PH , 120). ‘Mostly, my cousins did the talking and Aunty Ifeoma sat back and watched them, eating slowly. She looked like a football coach who had done a good job with her team and was satisfied to stand next to the eighteen-yard box and watch’ (PH , 121). Such scenes represent the family as an intimate sphere in which the potentially if unpredictably political virtues of volubility, eloquence and critique are

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consciously nurtured. Politically radical and ‘culturally conscious’ (Amaka only listens to musicians ‘with something real to say’ like Fela Kuti and Onyeka Onwenu [118]), the children are already translating these initially domestic talents into directly political aptitudes. They are scoring goals with the skills their mother has taught them, which is presumably why she stands next to the eighteen-yard box rather than on the halfway line. Ifeoma pointedly explains the concept of ‘defiance’ (PH , 144) to Jaja while Father Amadi encourages Kambili to learn ‘the art of questioning’ from Amaka (PH , 179). These scenes amount to an extended albeit indirect training in the nature of democracy and democratic leadership. Ifeoma is a ‘coach’ not an autocrat, whose aim is to empower not control her children. For Purple Hibiscus, then, democracy is associated not with abstract slogans or derivative models but with specific aptitudes and practices. When the coup is announced Eugene denounces the succession of military takeovers in postcolonial Nigeria: Of course, Papa told us, the politicians were corrupt, and the Standard had written many stories about the cabinet ministers who stashed money in foreign bank accounts, money meant for paying teachers’ salaries and building roads. But what we Nigerians needed was not soldiers ruling us, what we needed was renewed democracy. Renewed Democracy. (PH , 24–5)

As Corinne Sandwith points out, this is a description of ‘the stereotypical trajectory of the failed postcolonial state’: ‘Nigerian history is rendered not as textured or historically specific but rather in the model of the caricatural or symbolic.’81 What Eugene’s portentous statement lacks is any understanding of the larger origins of corruption and dictatorship in economic dependency and colonial power relations as well as a ‘textured’ understanding of struggles and alternatives. Those alternatives are reduced to a moral (rather than political) critique and a pretty euphemistic slogan that an impressionable young Kambili credulously repeats or, perhaps, that her unexpectedly shrewd narration calls attention to and the vapidity of which she thus accentuates. Eugene’s is a principled but also very vague and, as Kambili quickly notes, largely rhetorical commitment to democracy that ‘sounded important’ but amounts really to a kind of self-aggrandising performance, the effect of which is not to galvanise his audience but to make them forget themselves, as Kambili puts it.

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One of the most interesting and also, for the secular or atheist reader in particular, challenging aspects of the novel is Aunty Ifeoma’s sincere commitment to her Catholic faith. Her family signifies a more empowering but no less devout form of Christian worship shorn of the Eurocentrism, dogma and repressive discipline associated with Eugene and Father Benedict. Crucially, Eugene’s unbendingly orthodox church is also opposed to the regime: Father Benedict’s sermon praises Eugene for using the Standard ‘to speak the truth’ and for not being ‘like other Big Men in this country’ who support the coup (PH , 5). Again, however, democracy is something that is most vitally and effectively nurtured in this novel not through slogans and commitments but at the level of practices. I don’t think it is especially helpful for Lily G.N. Mabura to read Father Amadi, the handsome and charismatic young priest who visits Ifeoma’s family and who falls for Kambili while she is staying with them, as ‘anti-Catholic, at least in regard to the brand of Catholicism introduced in Igboland’.82 As Mabura herself shows, the novel is unflinching in its scathing portrayal of the Church’s prudishness, its misogyny and its Eurocentric iconography and forms of worship. But Ifeoma’s and Father Amadi’s is not a faith that has been ‘introduced’; it is one that has clearly been substantially repurposed and repoliticised: ‘from within the church Adichie implicitly criticises dogmas such as the infallibility of the pope and the celibacy of the priesthood, and offers an alternative to patriarchal and religious absolutism, shame and body-hatred’, as Cheryl Stobie demonstrates.83 ‘Kambili’s progress’, as Sandwith notes, ‘is from stuttering, choking, and silence to speech, argument, questioning; from the still, closed, negated body encouraged by the church (or the nonfunctional bodies of the privileged) to a body that works, sweats, runs, laughs, desires, dances, and sings.’84 Amaka’s refusal to adopt a Western name for her confirmation is consistent with this critical adaptation of religious practice. The novel’s determination to portray both the Church and the family as arenas of political struggle is evident in the carefully elaborated contrast between Father Amadi’s and Father Benedict’s rival understandings of Catholic worship and doctrine. Father Benedict insists ‘that the Credo and kyrie be recited only in Latin’ (PH , 4) in defiance of the ecumenical objectives of the Second Vatican Council with its permission to celebrate Mass in vernacular languages. He is contemptuous of the participatory forms of worship that his seemingly (at least to young Kambili) compliant congregation associates with ‘the mushroom Pentecostal churches’ (PH , 5). The

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iconography of his church is entirely Eurocentric, with its ‘blond Christ’ (PH , 178) and ‘blond, life-size Virgin Mary’ (PH , 4). Eugene’s favourite title for the Blessed Virgin is ‘Our Lady, Shield of the Nigerian People’ (PH , 11), a combination of nationalist cliché and vacuous entreaty. By contrast Father Amadi’s faith and, increasingly, partly due to his example, that of Kambili are closely linked to the lives and especially the suffering as well as the expressive bodies of the poor. They both see the possibility of redemption in the hopeful faces, joyful physicality and scarred bodies of Father Amadi’s young footballers: I see Christ in their faces, in the boys’ faces. I looked at him. I could not reconcile the blond Christ hanging on the burnished cross in St. Agnes and the sting-scarred legs of those boys. (PH , 178)

Many readers will be struck by the echoes here of liberation theology, particularly in Father Amadi’s apparent desire, associated with the reforms of Vatican II, to return the Church to the lessons of the Gospels and to a practical solidarity with the bodies and struggles of the poor. Liberation theology is principally associated, of course, with Latin America and with the continuing fight for social and economic justice for indigenous peoples, workers and landless peasants. The liberation struggles of the 1960s and onwards resulted, as is well known, in US-backed military dictatorships throughout the Americas as well as the killing of Catholic priests by military and paramilitary groups, with US connivance, in Colombia, El Salvador and elsewhere. What Father Amadi’s militancy indicates is that religion serves as a contested arena of civil society that serves both as an agent of indoctrination and as a potential source of radical political socialisation. It is not quite the case for Purple Hibiscus, though it may be for Father Amadi, that Christ represents the possibility of political revolution, that in Terry Eagleton’s words ‘the ultimate signifier of the human condition is the tortured and murdered body of a political criminal.’85 But what is presumably dawning on Kambili here is the divergent and incompatible political meanings associated with the example and the tortured body of Christ. What the boys’ ‘sting-scarred legs’ denote that the ‘blond Christ’ in St. Agnes does not, for instance, is the possibility of racial justice and liberation emphasised by black theologians like James Cone, Jacquelyn Grant and Delores Williams or, in African contexts, Ananias Mpunzi.86 The novel’s protagonist’s potential

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journey towards a more conscientised subjectivity will be catalysed by these interpretative and practical decisions about religious observance. The novel certainly assumes that faith might interpellate one as an opponent of power and privilege. Kambili’s affective and amorous attachment to Father Amadi, whose own model in imitatio Christi is the revolutionary of the Gospels, opens up the possibility of a radical solidarity with the destitute and the dispossessed, even a vision of political love or at least a principled aversion to the sins of acquisitiveness, greed and exploitation. Even Eugene, we learn in the final chapter, has done his best to pass through the eye of a needle by bequeathing half his estate to children’s hospitals, motherless babies’ homes and disabled veterans (PH , 297). The vision glimpsed by the novel, however, is of Christian dogma translated into radical practice in every sphere and in every civil and political institution. That is surely how Kambili’s ecstatic vision of the Virgin towards the end of the novel asks to be read, not as a confirmation of her father’s orthodox beliefs and definitely not as evidence of credulity but as a fervent expression of a consistent and practical as well as radical Catholic faith. The sun turned white, the color and shape of the host. And then I saw her, the Blessed Virgin: an image in the pale sun, a red glow on the back of my hand, a smile on the face of the rosary-bedecked man whose arms rubbed against mine. She was everywhere. (PH , 274–5)

Stobie suggests that this apparition, based according to her on the Marian apparitions at Aokpe between 1992 and 1996, is a ‘manifold signifier’ like the dark-skinned Virgin of Guadalupe that appeared to an indigenous man in New Spain in 1531 and became a ‘syncretic melding’ of the Virgin and the Aztec deity Tonantzin, a non-Eurocentric icon of female power.87 The transformations glimpsed by the novel are even more thorough and far–reaching than that, however, because what Stobie does not mention and the adolescent Kambili does not yet fully understand is the availability of a radically and comprehensively practical theology of liberation. The rubbing together of bodies carries a frisson of sexual desire for Kambili but it also occasions a vision of social and political equality rooted in believers’ shared corporeality. Sandwith insists, entirely mistakenly in my view, that ‘[w]hat the novel appears to confirm is that modes of everyday political action in the postcolony are limited to the symbolic realm.’88 But is Kambili’s newfound

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ability to be a body and to move and desire with her body and thus to contest the disciplining and effacement of her body by ‘the various ideological projects of colonial-Christianity, patriarchy, and absolutism’ merely ‘symbolic’? There is no reason to read scepticism about ‘the possibilities of direct political resistance’, that is, ‘the political force of bodies in the street’, into ‘the ease with which bodies are disciplined into obedience through the violence of the state’ since the novel actually shows, as Sandwith’s own analysis proves, how those disciplinary projects are resisted. Only one political gathering is depicted in the novel. Sandwith refers to it as ‘the waving of green leaves in celebration of the military coup’, a scene in which, she claims, ‘the exercise of public political engagement is reduced to the formulaic, unthinking, and grotesque.’89 Sandwith does not tell us why she sees the gathering as ‘formulaic’ and ‘grotesque’, though it is of course true that a military coup is hardly an unalloyed cause for jubilation. Yet these are not just ‘green’ leaves but specifically palm leaves, associated with Palm Sunday (the day of Jaja’s refusal to attend communion on which the book begins and to which the rest of the action is a prelude) and thus with Christ’s entry to Jerusalem. There is a deeper and much more complex and possibly contradictory set of meanings that needs to be unpicked in this scene and its relation to the rest of the novel. The palm leaves spread before Christ denote either (or both) his acclamation as a king and the imminent victory of peace and of Christ’s revolutionary message. Jaja, of course, who will eventually take his mother’s punishment for the killing of Eugene, is likened to the Son of God in his rebelliousness, altruism, suffering and martyrdom. The events of the novel, which explain and prepare for both his punishment by the state and the putative resurrection and redemption countenanced in the coda, have their parallel in the story of Christ’s Passion. And if we recall the radical ways in which, as we have seen, Catholic doctrine is politically repurposed in the text then it is possible to see the gathering not literally as a ‘formulaic’ scene in which an ‘unthinking’ mob greets the ascension of another autocrat but, symbolically at least, as an expression of faith in the possibility of substantive rather than merely superficial political change. The crime for which the son is martyred is after all the death of the Father, Jaja’s own father of course but also, symbolically at least, the father or dictator of the state itself.

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The palm leaves are described in the novel on more than one occasion as ‘green branches’. The family’s driver Kevin fastens them to the front of the car when he drives the children to school so that the demonstrators at Government Square would let us drive past. The green branches meant Solidarity. Our branches never looked as bright as the demonstrators’, though, and sometimes as we drove past, I wondered what it would be like to join them, chanting “Freedom,” standing in the way of cars. (PH , 27)

Kambili also describes seeing a man ‘kneeling on the road beside his Peugeot 504, with his hands raised high in the air’ at an army roadblock. These fleeting impressions of state violence and political protest imparted by a materially privileged child who can identify the precise make of a car but who understands virtually nothing of the political turmoil she glimpses through a moving window tell us little about whether the crowds are demonstrating for the coup (perhaps out of exasperation with the venality of the ousted civilian administration) or against it. Why do Kevin’s expediently placed branches seem to Kambili less bright than those flourished by the exciting crowds in the street? There is no evidence in the novel that allows us to conclude confidently that ‘direct political resistance’ or even just ‘public political engagement’ are ‘formulaic, unthinking, and grotesque’. To the contrary: the ‘freedom’ to which Kambili is attracted is certainly the freedom to move through public space but it is also the freedom to stand ‘in the way of cars’, which image is certainly susceptible to being read as an image of political resistance in precisely the same way as the green leaves are susceptible to being read as a ‘bright’ or vivid image of political solidarity. Sandwith is right that the novel is replete with symbols. But that does not mean that Purple Hibiscus deems that ‘political action in the postcolony’ is ‘limited to the symbolic realm’, which is a formulation that owes more to Mbembe’s mystifyingly popular work on ‘the postcolony’ than it does to the specific employment of symbols in Adichie’s work. For what these symbols are symbols of, I am trying to show, albeit somewhat cryptic symbols, is the availability of political action. The novel portrays no revolutionary exploits, it is true. State power is not overthrown. The wider context of violence, protest, impoverishment and injustice is usually only glimpsed by the younger Kambili, usually from the windows of her father’s chauffeur-driven car: a beggar

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to whom her father flings naira notes or soldiers demolishing vegetable stalls and whipping a market woman (PH , 44–5). But what the novel does is portray the emergence of a more critical and eloquent personality from the terrified silence and violent submission of her youth in the context, crucially, of half-glimpsed and dimly understood scenes and symbols of political revolt. It is in Ifeoma’s house that Jaja learns the meaning of the word ‘defiance’. This is also where Kambili, goaded by Amaka and encouraged by Ifeoma, finally learns to be insistent and vociferous (PH , 170). The fact that this acquisition of will and speech takes place alongside and partly in response to the imposition of ‘helplessness’ (PH , 45) and silence at the level of the state means that it ought to be seen as an embryonic form of political action in its own right, albeit for now at a micro-level and, obviously, within the realm of fiction. This is a novel about the surreptitious germination of an incipiently radical form of political subjectivity in a state in which ‘politics’ typically signifies the unseemly jockeying for positions of official privileges or else has been reduced to a series of meaningless invocations about ‘Renewed Democracy’ and national loyalty. Kambili is hardly capable of speaking at school assembly: we see her ‘stuttering’ the pledge of faith and loyalty to Nigeria (PH , 49), as though speech and the reluctance or inability to speak are inescapably political acts. To recite the pledge is to be interpellated as an obedient citizen. To not articulate the pledge or for the pledge to catch in one’s throat is to countenance the possibility of cultivating a more radical and autonomous or unscripted form of political subjectivity. ‘“Imagine what the Standard would be if we were all quiet”’, jokes Ade Coker when presented to Eugene’s cowed and mute offspring (PH , 58). Eugene doesn’t laugh of course because Ade has spot lit the novel’s central political insight, that assertiveness and volubility, nurtured in the micro-sphere of the family but also sometimes stifled there, are necessary public and political virtues. Andrade sees falsity in the novel’s hopeful conclusion.90 The Abachaesque Head of State is dead and the ‘interim civilian government’ is releasing prisoners of conscience (PH , 297). My own view is that these final images are equivocal. There is no ‘objective correlative’ for Kambili’s optimism, as Andrade observes. It is as though the novel were stressing and bemoaning the vast gulf that remains between its ideals and the distant prospect of their realisation, between Kambili’s awakening sensibility and what Andrade calls ‘a quiescent and corrupted body politic.’91 Ifeoma and her family have emigrated to the United States but are

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conscious that this is not so much a rescue as a defeat. The novel is both a ‘quiet critique of women’s failure to become political actors, to live up to their responsibility as citizens’,92 and a forceful indication of what effective citizenship and political action would entail. The novel stresses both the necessity and the nature but also the extreme difficulty of citizenship and political action. The events of the whole novel have been tightly focalised through the perspectives and experiences of Kambili as she cultivates these virtues. Her very narrow and even at times positively erroneous or at least indoctrinated viewpoint is our only lens, one that is manifestly partial and therefore frequently ironised but that is at no point appraised or censured from a retrospective position of greater maturity or insight. Adichie’s characteristic technique is to encourage readers themselves to perform the work of judgement and interpretation with the aid of telling and suggestive details. So when the narrative shifts to the present tense in ‘A Different Silence’, the novel’s final chapter or coda in which Kambili and Beatrice visit Jaja behind bars, we move from a position in which the events of the plot have already taken place and must now be narrated and understood to one in which their outcome is as yet undecided. There is no suggestion that by killing Eugene with rat poison Beatrice has performed a political act, though the novel certainly contains no censure of it. But by claiming responsibility for the deed and enduring imprisonment, Jaja’s sacrifice is at least indirectly or rather symbolically political. The future of this family seems bleak: Beatrice is disturbed and aloof while the incarcerated Jaja is taciturn and in poor health. Or does it? Jaja’s was an intensely meaningful sacrifice, in this novel structured by events culminating on Palm Sunday, of his own freedom for the freedom from domestic tyranny of his mother and sister. This is not an acte gratuite but the consequence of his defiant refusal to attend communion with which the novel begins. It is in fact an act of unselfish leadership, born out of the gradually acquired quality of ‘defiance’, a capacity for eloquent speech and a carefully cultivated ‘art of questioning’. Jaja finally uses those weapons in the extremely trying context of domestic tyranny with results that are equivocal and uncertain. The general acquisition of these attributes, however, would give directly political content to the merely abstract form of national independence which is repeatedly symbolised in this text by Eugene’s vacuous dream of ‘Renewed Democracy’, of the pledge of faith and loyalty to Nigeria that Kambili stammers at school and of the grandiloquent motto

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inscribed on the plinth of the statue of a rampant lion at the University of Nigeria: ‘“To restore the dignity of man”’ (PH , 112). The most resonant symbol in the novel is of course the purple hibiscus flower, which I think we should read as a signifier of the possibility of creative political action. Hibiscuses are used throughout the novel for decorating church altars or ornamenting Eugene’s houses. Purple hibiscuses, on the other hand, have a further and much more radical significance. The ‘all’ that Nsukka starts in the following quotation, that is, the chain of events that results eventually in Jaja’s defiance, the killing of Eugene and the mood of radically uncertain possibility at the close of the novel, is associated with that particular cultivar. Nsukka started it all; Aunty Ifeoma’s garden next to the little verandah of her flat in Nsukka began to lift the silence. Jaja’s defiance seemed to me now like Aunty Ifeoma’s experimental purple hibiscus: rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do. (PH , 16)

The most obvious and least interesting as well as by far the most misguided thing one could say about the ‘experimental purple hibiscus’ is that it is a hybrid of red and blue. There is absolutely no indication in the novel that purple hibiscuses represent hybridity. In any case, as Robert Young pointed out more than twenty years ago, the popular rhetoric of hybridisation is of extremely dubious provenance. The term was taken originally from the language of horticulture and its appropriation by imperialist race theory. Young shows that the notion of ‘hybridity’ ‘developed from biological and botanical origins’. So ‘the use of hybridity today prompts questions about the ways in which contemporary thinking has broken absolutely with the racialized formulations of the past.’93 I am convinced that the critical and theoretical obsession with hybridity is usually unhelpful for critics of postcolonial writing. It assumes that cultures or languages or ‘races’ were ‘unhybrid’ or pre-hybrid at some point in the past, which was not the case, not least because languages, cultures and ‘races’ are by definition hybrid amalgams fashioned by various contributors and points of origin. At its worst therefore, hybridity theory assumes (wrongly) that humans and their languages and cultures once belonged to entirely separate spheres, which they did not. That is what Young means by suggesting that hybridity inadvertently shares some

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ground with ‘the racialized formulations of the past’ and perhaps also of the present. Even at its best, however, hybridity theory is just a platitude about how cultures and languages are always already adulterated, which is hardly worth saying because that is a truth universally acknowledged by absolutely everybody outside the realms of fascist and imperialist fantasies about hierarchies of ‘pure’ cultures. In this novel the hibiscuses are instead and quite explicitly symbols of rareness, originality and ingenuity, of a kind of creative departure from a situation in which ‘all the hibiscuses in our front yard were a startling red’ (PH , 16). Red is a colour that denotes violence and like the ‘red blur’ that obscures the words in her textbooks for Kambili it recalls the ‘spirit’ of her miscarried baby brother ‘strung together by narrow lines of blood’ (PH , 52). Freedom or the opposite of violence is something that is cultivated, in short; it does not grow naturally. The precise nature of the freedom symbolised by the purple hibiscus differs ‘from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square’ since it augurs a definitive departure from the habitual cycle of coups and counter-coups and of abject submission to tyrants and heads of state. Purple hibiscuses are associated with the militant milieu of Ifeoma’s household where they are cultivated so skilfully that a medley of flowers resembles a work of art and where that medley represents not natural beauty but the production of beauty by human work and ingenuity. In front was a circular burst of bright colors—a garden—fenced around with barbed wire. Roses and hibiscuses and lilies and ixora and croton grew side by side like a hand-painted wreath. Aunty Ifeoma emerged from the flat in a pair of shorts, rubbing her hands over the front of her T-shirt. The skin at her knees was very dark. (PH , 112)

This is clearly an image of beauty accomplished through toil and intelligence. That is why Jaja’s defiance resembles a purple hibiscus. The rare purple hibiscuses are the result of ‘experimental work’ undertaken by Ifeoma’s friend Phillipa, a lecturer in botany, ‘“while she was here’’ (PH , 128). Was Phillipa a visiting lecturer? Is she a lecturer who has now joined the brain drain to precarious adjunct professorships in the United States? Either way, the suggestion here is that this creative capacity is currently imperilled, which is why it has to be protected by barbed wire. Crucially, it is Jaja that learns to cultivate these flowers, stalks of which

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he takes home and plans to cultivate in Eugene’s garden (PH , 197). The government agents who try to bribe Eugene to muffle the Standard’s anti-government editorials ‘yanked hibiscuses off as they left’ (PH , 200). If the dictatorship and its goons destroy, Ifeoma and Jaja create. The hibiscuses are unmistakeably symbols of the possibility of political action. The novel does not end with the advent of new institutions or structures, of course, but it does conclude in a more cautious mood of political possibility. ‘The new rains will come down soon’ (PH , 307) is at once a confident forecast that better conditions for cultivating purple hibiscuses will soon transpire and, since this sentence is in the present progressive tense, an auspicious reminder that the novel’s incipiently and symbolically political actions of defiance and questioning are as yet merely ongoing or incomplete. So we should construe Purple Hibiscus if not as a novel about the imminence of revolutionary action then at least as a text that narrates the exemplary emergence, in the figures of its narrator-protagonist and her brother, from the often grievously compromised institutions of Nigerian civil society (the Church, the family and higher education) of a potentially radical form of political subjectivity. Hannah Arendt’s extraordinarily rich account of the human capacity for political action in The Human Condition helps us to tease out the attributes and possibilities of that subjectivity poised at the end of the novel on the cusp of decisive political exploits. The principal feature of action is certainly not continuity or repetition but unpredictability and novelty—what Arendt calls ‘natality’, the bringing into being of something new.94 Action is the fully conscious interruption or disruption of thoughtless and reified processes such as the irrational pursuit of economic growth for its own sake, the domination of human beings, the use of technology in the service of exploitation and the catastrophic despoliation of the natural world. These are radical social and economic processes initiated by human action that no longer seem susceptible to it. Indeed The Human Condition, Arendt declares, is nothing but a stimulus to ‘the activity of thinking’, a way of revolving these predicaments and trends in the mind and learning to appreciate their susceptibility to human agency and political transformation.95 Arendt’s classic study does not profess to offer any solutions or answers since ‘they are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many; they can never lie in theoretical considerations or the opinion of one person’ (HC, 5). Politics for Arendt is not the prescriptive business of decreeing and imposing solutions but something more like ‘plurality’, which involves

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conversation and disagreement as well as practical experimentation. Effective political action aims at the bringing into being of constitutions and institutions that allow for the maximum amount of deliberation in all spheres of life. It is collective, not in the sense of a people acting in concert but in the more sophisticated and enabling and, I think, considerably more auspicious sense of a people deploying together the signal political aptitudes of eloquent speech. To speak is to articulate the distinctive viewpoint of each individual, to actualise ‘the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals’ (HC, 178).96 ‘Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being’ (HC, 3). Such statements might sound like truisms but in my view they express the supremely important insight that politics is simply a way of finding justifications for rule by powerful castes if it does not signify above everything else the creation of maximal opportunities for the articulation and exchange of multiple points of view. Kambili is learning that speech is what makes us political beings capable of interceding disruptively in public affairs. That is what action means, ultimately, for Arendt, since ‘to be isolated is to be deprived of the possibility to act’ (HC, 188). So the dictator who arrogates the responsibility of action is, in a sense, not acting at all and is certainly not interrupting the repetitive rhythms of domination and submission in human history. He treats others not as equals or as fellow participants in deliberation but, as Arendt suggests in a wonderfully evocative and pertinent passage, as passive material with which he might fabricate some object. [A]ction and speech are surrounded by and in constant contact with the web of the acts and words of other men. The popular belief in a “strong man” who, isolated against others, owes his strength to his being alone is either sheer superstition, based on the delusion that we can “make” something in the realm of human affairs—“make” institutions or laws. For instance, as we make tables and chairs, or make men “better” or “worse”— or it is conscious despair of all action, political and non-political, coupled with the utopian hope that it may be possible to treat men as one treats other “material”. (HC, 188)

The idea that ‘men’ might be directed or controlled in pursuit of some political aim or that institutions and laws, the means by which ‘men’ agree to live together, might be fashioned not by them but by some governing

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agent is a profoundly misguided and calamitous category mistake. ‘Men’ are not passive material like the dead wood from which one might make a chair but in fact ebulliently and multifacetedly (and thankfully) active. That is what makes them ‘men’, a category which, like Mensch in German, is for Arendt presumably not gender-specific. For ‘the human condition’, that tenuous entity that Arendt ambitiously and even hubristically sets out to sketch, is finally nothing other than plurality: ‘No man can be sovereign because not one man, but men, inhabit the earth’ (HC, 234). Speech, defiance, criticality and finally action are aptitudes that Kambili and Jaja spend the extent of this novel acquiring, although the ultimate ramifications of Jaja’s action (his sacrifice of his freedom for his mother and sister) and of Beatrice’s action (her killing of Eugene) as well as the possibility of future political actions in a state whose dictator has perished, like Abacha, in ignominious circumstances are left intriguingly unsettled at its denouement. It only remains, therefore, to acknowledge that this intensely symbolic novel is asking questions, like Arendt, without hazarding explicit answers, since those answers ‘are matters of practical politics, subject to the agreement of many’. Replete with those floral images of creativity and ingenuity, of a creative departure from existing practice, of sacrifice, solidarity and martyrdom, of tyranny and its overthrow, Purple Hibiscus invites from its readers the politically essential ‘activity of thinking’ about the nature and possibility of transformative political change. It is a detailed riposte to the ‘despairing’ conclusion that only demagogues and vanguards are capable of overseeing institutions and laws.

Totality and Transformation It is true that in many respects Nigeria has recovered from the larcenous dictatorship of the Abacha years. The sham democracy of officially sanctioned political parties has given way to constitutional government. Bourne points to ‘the vitality of civil society and the press in an era of instant communications.’97 We can be pretty confident that, as Wole Soyinka prophesied, ‘Abacha is the last despot who will impose himself on the Nigerian nation.’98 Yet gross national income per head remains, scandalously for a country so richly endowed with resources, significantly lower than that of comparable low-income countries and that of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Falling prices and falling exports have illustrated the folly of the Nigerian economy’s dependence on oil. Demand has been

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reduced by the arrival of new competitors and the growth of alternative sources of energy. The dependence on oil revenue is still an incentive for corrupt relationships between oil companies and Nigerian politicians. This problem is inseparable from the multiplication of states in Nigeria’s federal system and from the identity politics and ethnic competition for scarce resources that results. Oil profits have certainly not been invested in a viable public health system. In 2019 Nigeria was in 158th place in the Human Development Index, with deplorably high rates of infant mortality and of preventable and treatable diseases. The fixation with oil has also restricted investment in other more employment-intensive sectors such as agriculture. The removal of fuel subsidies in 2012 was the catalyst for the strikes and protests of the ‘Occupy Nigeria’ movement powered by a combination of trade unions, under- and unemployed workers as well as graduates and young professionals with vanishing prospects (including many returnees from the Nigerian diaspora).99 There is a close link, therefore, between the rise of militant political protest in Nigeria in recent years and the persistently skewed development of an economy in which growth, investment and profitability as ever go hand in hand with joblessness and very low standards of living for the majority. In the North, large numbers of unemployed youths without economic prospects are as dry kindling to the flames of militant jihadism spreading from the Middle East and the Sahel. The toxic ideology of Boko Haram, as Virginia Comolli argues, ‘feeds on socio-economic marginalisation.’100 Nigeria’s vast oil wealth has largely been squandered since independence. Much of it has been repatriated by foreign firms such as Shell and Chevron that also stand accused of grievous environmental and other crimes in the Delta region. A sovereign wealth fund aimed at reinvesting some of the profits of oil extraction was established only in 2012. Nigeria may be classed as one of the rapidly growing MINT countries, but in 2010 61% of its population lived on less than a dollar a day. The perennial problem of what Okwudiba Nnoli calls this ‘distorted and externallyoriented’ economy is that it ‘encourages locally generated surplus to be transferred to foreign centres of production.’101 According to the World Bank, US$400 billion has been stolen from the Nigerian treasury since independence. Is Nigeria really a dictatorship? No. Is it a colony? No. But put it this way: Nigeria has without question failed to surmount the political and economic legacies of colonialism and dictatorship. ‘Monopolistic company rule’, comments Adam Mayer, ‘has been the guiding principle

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of the Nigerian political economy since the days of Sir George Goldie in the 19th century’ (NM , 40). It is therefore a source of profound hope that one is able to observe that protest against Nigeria’s persistent underdevelopment continues. Indeed these mobilisations might be seen as the latest manifestation of a long tradition of the oppressed going back to the general strike of 1945 through to the anti-SAP mobilisations of the 1980s and after. As old as the aspiration for independence itself and in practice indistinguishable from it, the dream of establishing a genuine popular participatory democracy still breathes. In the final chapter of Purple Hibiscus Amaka has written to Kambili about an article in an American magazine expressing scepticism that the Virgin appeared in Nigeria: ‘all that corruption and all that heat’ (PH , 300). If that text peddles a clichéd and one-sided misrepresentation of Nigeria as a doomed backwater then this text presents it as a place of unrealised possibility, which is how this study has presented a whole continent caught still in a moment of arrested or incomplete decolonisation. Adam Mayer seems to assume that Adichie’s global fame, stemming from the ingenious marketing of her fiction and also from her enormously popular TED talk on feminism (famously sampled by Beyoncé), makes her work ‘afraid of controversial issues’ and ‘near-oblivious to the lives of the downtrodden’ (NM , 182).102 By his own admission, Mayer is no literary critic (NM , 13). ‘Adichie’s unique gift for storytelling’, he tells us, ‘does not make her a political radical’ (NM , 182). I have not claimed that she is. Nor do I consider Adichie’s own politics to be especially relevant. Rather, my claim has been that, given the lasting and overbearing context of neo-colonial domination in Nigeria, her fictional work cannot help but address, in however oblique a way, precisely that struggle for ‘a genuine popular participatory democracy’ (NM , 191) that Mayer’s own study sets out, one that would enable Nigerians finally to prevail over persistent political and economic under-development. I began by trying to defend Fredric Jameson’s thesis that we can indeed speak in general rather than incessantly specific and isolating terms about the formal and thematic features of postcolonial writing, not least because doing so is one way of reiterating in a postcolonial context Marxist criticism’s signature insight, articulated most succinctly by Jameson himself, that literary texts dramatise the unfinished struggle against class and state power. My hypothesis, therefore, is that this struggle against political and economic under-development is the deeper theme of postcolonial Nigerian fiction. Helon Habila’s Measuring Time, for example, is another text

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that explores national politics through domestic tyranny and that touches ambitiously on the vital themes of electoral politics, entrepreneurial schemes, mercenary armies, liberation wars and ecological destruction. That novel measures and connects different historical periods, specifically the colonial, the immediately postcolonial and the present, a lengthy span allegorised by its twin protagonists’ talent for survival and for the opening up of personal and political possibilities. Mamo pens ‘A plan for a True History of Keti’, ‘a human history’ modelled after Plutarch that provides a figure and a model for the novel in which he appears. Both amount to ‘a true history’, ‘one that looks at the lives of individuals, ordinary people who toil and dream and suffer, who bear the brunt of whatever vicissitude time inflicts on the nation.’103 Listing and summarising would do scant justice to the fantastic variety and complexity of the ways in which Nigerian novelists have addressed the dreaming and the suffering of independence. But I wish to defend the methodological legitimacy, indeed necessity, of generalisations; in Hegel’s maxim, remember, to generalise is to think. Such texts are, to use a celebrated phrase from Erich Auerbach, necessarily ‘fraught with background’, specifically the background of Nigeria’s lasting struggle against economic and political under-development.104 I suspect that the reason why Ahmad’s critique of Jameson met with such approval and subsequently gave rise to the widely circulated legend of Jameson’s blindness to the diversity of ‘third-world’ cultures was partly to do, as Lazarus too suspects, with a general suspicion among postcolonialists of Jameson’s Marxism but, more specifically, with their unwarranted hostility towards the nature and purpose of the Marxist category of totality. Totality is a concept that asks us to accept not that something is the same everywhere but, more modestly, that similar conditions prevail everywhere, conditions that are worked out and experienced in different ways. Capitalism, we might say, is total but not universal, since it is by definition uneven and since it invariably generates struggles and therefore an immense variety of manifestations. This fact does not mean, of course, that there are not enormous differences between locations in Africa or in the world-system right down to the most minute levels of social existence, which is why the Warwick Research Collective refer to the irreducible specificity105 of those locations, by which term they are signalling the varying extents to which the totalising dynamics of capital have prevailed in a given location or been opposed and to the mediation of capital and commodification by particular cultural traditions, political institutions and

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social structures. ‘Not looking for totality is just code for not looking at capitalism’, as Eagleton has argued.106 To look for totality is to think about the countless ways in which totality is mediated by contexts and about the variety of ways in which that totality is represented but also often resisted by texts of various kinds. Talk about totality is not totalitarian, in other words; the aim of looking for it is to understand it better and challenge it more effectively. ‘Totality is not an affirmative but a critical category’, in Adorno’s words.107 That is the claim I have been trying to get across in this chapter: everywhere one looks in postcolonial Africa one sees the persistence of capitalist imperialism, one of the consistent features of which is the concentration of class and state power, in addition, crucially, to enduring struggles for democratic alternatives. This is the burden and privilege of Nigerian fiction, which is not to say, of course that all of Nigerian fiction is somehow the same. A ludicrous idea! The opposite is the case of course: this vitally important body of work finds multiple ways of representing and resisting that situation and therefore of revealing the possibility of transformation.

Notes 1. Chinua Achebe, ‘Colonialist Criticism’, Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–1987 , London: Heinemann, 1988, pp. 46–61 (p. 58). 2. Yusufu Bala Usman, quoted in Adam Mayer, Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria, London: Pluto Press, 2016, p. 120. Subsequent quotations are given in the text after NM . 3. Pramod K. Nayar, Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology, Oxford: John Wiley, 2014, p. 28. 4. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, ‘Universality and Difference’, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Ashcroft et al., Second edition, London: Routledge, 2006, pp. 71–72 (p. 71). 5. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 110. 6. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 55. 7. In addition to Lazarus’s ‘defence’ and the present chapter, there is Imre Szeman’s ‘Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 100:3 (2001), 803–827; Avram Alpert’s ‘We Are Cannibals, All: Fredric Jameson on Colonialism and Experience’, Postcolonial Studies, 13:1 (2010), 91–105;

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

Ian Buchanan, ‘National Allegory Today: The Return to Jameson’, New Formations, 51.1 (2003), 66–79; Julie McGonegal, ‘Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory, and the Always-Already-Read Third World Text’, Interventions, 7:2 (2005), 251–265; and James Christie. ‘Jameson among the Contras: Third-World Culture, Neoliberal Globalization, and the Latin American Connection’, Mediations 29:1 (2015), 43–67. Fredric Jameson, ‘Globalization and Political Strategy’, New Left Review, 4 (2000), 49–68. Fredric Jameson, ‘Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, The Jameson Reader, ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000, pp. 315–339 (pp. 319–320), italics in the original. Ibid., p. 330. Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 20–36; Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 232. Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971, p. 352. Ibid., p. 354. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso, 1992, p. 104. Ahmad, In Theory, p. 105. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 101. Jameson, ‘Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, p. 319. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 89. Szeman, ‘Who’s Afraid of National Allegory?’ p. 804. Ibid., pp. 806–807, emphasis in the original. Ahmad, In Theory, p. 105. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 17. Perry Anderson, Arguments Within English Marxism, London: Verso, 1980, p. 172. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, pp. 105–106. Inspired by Samir Amin’s work on the need for under-developed economies to ‘delink’ themselves from the capitalist world system, Bade Onimode’s Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria is the best account of the systematic under-development of Nigeria from the slave trade to the eve of the era of structural adjustment. Class struggle against corrupt elites within Nigeria must go hand in hand, Onimode argues, with disengagement from an unremittingly imperialist world system. Bade Onimode, Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: The Dialectics of Mass Poverty, London: Zed Books, 1982.

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26. Chinua Achebe, The Education of a British-Protected Child: Essays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2010, p. 32. 27. Richard Bourne, Nigeria: A New History of a Turbulent Century, London: Zed, 2015, p. 27. 28. Ibid., p. 161. 29. On structural adjustment in Nigeria see also Okwudiba Nnoli, ed., Dead-end to Nigerian Development: An Investigation on the Social, Economic and Political Crisis in Nigeria, Dakar: CODESRIA, 1993 and Bade Onimode, A Future for Africa: Beyond the Politics of Adjustment, London: Earthscan Publications, 1992. 30. Adebayo O. Olukoshi, ‘General Introduction: From Crisis to Adjustment in Nigeria’, The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, ed. Olukoshi, London: James Currey, 1993, pp. 1–15 (p. 2). 31. Olukoshi, p. 10. 32. Chinua Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day: Essays, London: Heinemann, 1975, p. 19. 33. Jago Morrison, ‘Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People: The Novel and the Public Sphere’, Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere, ed. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins, London: Palgrave, 2006, pp. 117–135 (p. 124). The classic statement of Achebe’s view that the novelist should assume a pedagogical role is of course ‘The Novelist as Teacher’, Hopes and Impediments, pp. 26–31. 34. Chinua Achebe, A Man of the People, London: Heinemann, 1988, p. 58. Subsequent quotations are given in the text after MP. 35. Morrison, ‘Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People: The Novel and the Public Sphere’, pp. 129–130. 36. Ibid., p. 130. 37. Habermas’s is a specifically male and bourgeois (not to mention Eurocentric) model and tradition of public deliberation that he first locates in the salons and coffee houses of eighteenth-century England, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge: Polity, 1989 [1962]. 38. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 228. 39. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o, ‘Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People’, Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics, London: Heinemann, 1972, pp. 51–54. 40. For Achebe the distrust of authority in Igbo culture, where he says ‘“King” means enemy’ but where British-imposed chiefs displaced forms of democratic accountability, needs to be transposed to the postolonial situation. ‘And this is quite central to my fiction and to my analysis of the problems of creating a new nation today. Obviously, we can’t go back

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41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

to the system in which every man is turning up at the village square— that’s in the past. But we have to find a way of dealing with the problems created by the fact that somebody says he’s speaking on your behalf, but you don’t know who he is. This is one of the problems of the modern world.’ Conversations with Chinua Achebe, ed. Bernth Lindfors, Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997, p. 78. Leon Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, trans. Max Eastman, London: Victor Gollancz, 1934, p. 17. Kez Okafor, ‘The Quest for Social Change: Reformation or Revolution?’, in Edith Ihekweazu (ed), Eagle on Iroko: Selected Papers from the Chinua Achebe International Symposium 1990, Ibadan: Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria), 1996, pp. 224–233 (p. 232). Neil ten Kortenaar, ‘“Only Connect”: Anthills of the Savannah and Achebe’s Trouble with Nigeria’, Research in African Literatures, 24:3 (1993), 59–72 (p. 67). Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: James Currey, 1991), p. 147. Bertolt Brecht, ‘Questions from a Worker Who Reads’, Poems: 1913– 1956, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim, New York: Methuen, 1976, pp. 252–253. Patricia Alden, ‘New Women and Old Myths: Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah and Nuruddin Farah’s Sardines ’, Critical Approaches to ‘Anthills of the Savannah’, ed. Holger G. Ehling, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991, pp. 67–80 (p. 69). Ibid., p. 74. The Sembène film is of course Emitaï . Jago Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014, p. 223. Kortneaar, ‘‘Only Connect’: Anthills of the Savannah and Achebe’s Trouble with Nigeria’, p. 68. Elleke Boehmer, ‘Of Goddesses and Stories: Gender and a New Politics in Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah’, Kunapipi, 12:2 (1990), 102–112 (p. 102). Ibid., p. 104. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 106. Ibid., p. 106. Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe, p. 125. Conversations with Chinua Achebe, p. 42. M.S.C. Okolo, ‘Re-establishing the Basis of Social Order in Africa: A Reflection on Achebe’s Reformist Agenda and Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Marxist aesthetics’, Intellectuals and African Development: Pretension and Resistance in African Politics, ed. Björn Beckman and Gbemisola Adeoti, London: Codresia in association with Zed Books, 2006, pp. 31–48 (p. 40).

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59. Ibid., p. 44. 60. David Richards, ‘Repossessing Time: Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah’, Kunapipi, 12:2 (1990), pp. 130–138 (p. 131). 61. Ibid., p. 135. 62. Robin Ikegami, ‘Knowledge and Power, The Story and the Storyteller: Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah’, Modern Fiction Studies, 37:3 (1991), 493–507 (p. 494). 63. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, London: Chatto & Windus, 1961. 64. Chinua Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, London: Heinemann, 1983, p. 1. 65. Chinua Achebe, There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, London: Allen Lane, 2012, pp. 52 and 243. 66. Ibid., p. 2. 67. Ibid., p. 244. 68. David A. Maughan Brown, ‘Anthills of the Savannah: Achebe’s Solutions to the “Trouble with Nigeria”’, Critical Approaches to ‘Anthills of the Savannah’ ed. Ehling, pp. 3–22 (p. 15). 69. Ibid., pp. 7, 11, and 20. 70. Achebe, The Trouble with Nigeria, p. 24. 71. Attahiru Jega, ‘Professional Associations and Structural Adjustment’, The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, ed. Olukoshi, pp. 97–111 (p. 105). 72. Susan Z. Andrade, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, p. 38. 73. Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The ‘Bildungsroman’ in European Culture, London: Verso, 1987, p. 10. 74. Jed Esty looks at several modern and especially modernist bildungsromane such as Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark that call bourgeois and colonial ideologies of development into question in Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 75. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions, Banbury: Ayebia, pp. 95 and 157. Quotations are given in the text after NC. 76. Susan Z. Andrade, ‘Adichie’s Genealogies: National and Feminine Novels’, Research in African Literatures, 42:2 (2011), 91–101 (p. 95). 77. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 19. 78. Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, London: Routledge, 2004, pp. 55–74. See also Benita Parry, ‘Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies’, Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002, pp. 66–81.

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79. Madelaine Hron, ‘Ora na-azu nwa: The Figure of the Child in ThirdGeneration Nigerian Novels’, Research in African Literatures, 39:2 (2008), 27–48 (pp. 30 and 32). 80. Ibid., p. 30. 81. Corinne Sandwith, ‘Frailties of the Flesh: Observing the Body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus ’, Research in African Literatures, 47:1 (2016), 95–108 (p. 97). 82. Lily G.N. Mabura, ‘Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun’, Research in African Literatures, 39:1 (2008), 203–222 (p. 213). 83. Cheryl Stobie, ‘Dethroning the Infallible Father: Religion, Patriarchy and Politics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus ’, Literature and Theology, 24:4 (2010), 421–435 (p. 422). 84. Sandwith, ‘Frailties of the Flesh: Observing the Body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus ’, p. 98. 85. Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, p. 37. 86. See Edward Antonio, ‘Black theology’, The Cambridge Companion to Liberation Theology, ed. Christopher Rowland, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 63–88. The key text here is James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, Revised edition, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986. 87. Stobie, ‘Dethroning the Infallible Father’, p. 430. 88. Sandwith, ‘Frailties of the Flesh: Observing the Body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus ’, p. 105. 89. Ibid., p. 106. 90. Andrade, ‘Adichie’s Genealogies: National and Feminine Novels’, p. 98. 91. Ibid., p. 98. 92. Ibid., p. 99. 93. Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, London: Routledge, 1995, p. 6. 94. Ziad Elmarsafy’s reflection on the instrumental role played by women activists in the 2012 Egyptian Revolution is an interesting defence of the concept of ‘natality’. ‘Action, imagination, institution, natality, revolution’, Journal for Cultural Research, 19:2 (2015), 130–138. 95. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Second edition, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1958], p. 5. Quotations are given in the text after HC. 96. On Arendt’s belief that all politics ought to rest ‘on the fact of human plurality’ see Hans Sluga, ‘The Pluralism of the Political: From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt’, Telos, 142 (2008), 91–109. 97. Bourne, Nigeria, p. 218.

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98. Wole Soyinka, The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 15. 99. Adam Branch and Zachariah Mampilly’s analysis shows how the Occupy Nigeria movement was hampered by the inability of different groups to adopt a common set of goals. The militant forces of the Save Nigeria Group, informally employed workers and the newer trade unions aimed for regime and system change while the much more cautious and even conservative aspirations of the leaders of the official Nigerian Labour Congress were for a negotiated settlement and the reinstatement of subsidies. Africa Uprising, pp. 94–112. Mala Mustapha has questioned the widespread perception that a youthful tech-savvy middle class was behind the mobilisations in 2012 and at the 2015 general election. What is required is not celebratory rhetoic about social media but ‘the empowerment of the poor’ and ‘mass action against the problem of deepened class division and inequality fostered by neoliberalism in the current Nigerian democratic space.’ ‘The 2015 general elections in Nigeria: new media, party politics and the political economy of voting’, Review of African Political Economy, 44:152 (2017), 312–321 (p. 318). 100. Virginia Comolli, Boko Haram: Nigeria’s Islamist Insurgency, London: Hurst, 2015, p. 6. 101. Quoted in Mayer, Naija Marxisms, p. 159. 102. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists, London: Fourth Estate, 2014. 103. Helon Habila, Measuring Time, London: Hamish Hamilton, 2007, p. 180. 104. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974 [1957], p. 9. 105. Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015, p. 12. 106. Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 11. 107. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Introduction’, The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, ed. Adorno et al., trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby, London: Heinemann, 1976, pp. 1–67 (p. 12).

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Jameson, Fredric. 1971. Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton U P. ———. [1981] 1996. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge. ———. 2000. “Globalization and Political Strategy.” New Left Review 4, 49–68. ———. 2000. “Third-world Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” The Jameson Reader. Ed. Michael Hardt and Kathi Weeks. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 315–339. Jega, Attahiru. 1993. “Professional Associations and Structural Adjustment.” The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Nigeria. Ed. Adebayo O. Olukoshi. London: James Currey, pp. 97–111. Kortenaar, Neil ten. 1993. “‘Only Connect’: Anthills of the Savannah and Achebe’s Trouble with Nigeria.” Research in African Literatures 24.3, 59–72. Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Mabura, Lily G.N. 2008. “Breaking Gods: An African Postcolonial Gothic Reading of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun.” Research in African Literatures 39.1, 203–222. Mayer, Adam. 2016. Naija Marxisms: Revolutionary Thought in Nigeria. London: Pluto Press. McGonegal, Julie. 2005. “Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory, and the Always-Already-Read Third World Text.” Interventions 7.2, 251–265. Moretti, Franco. 1987. The Way of the World: The ‘Bildungsroman’ in European Culture. London: Verso. Morrison, Jago. 2006. “Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People: The Novel and the Public Sphere.” Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere. Ed. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 117–135. ———. 2014. Chinua Achebe. Manchester: Manchester UP. Mustapha, Mal. 2017. “The 2015 General Elections in Nigeria: New Media, Party Politics and the Political Economy of Voting.” Review of African Political Economy, 44.152, 312–321. Nayar, Pramod K. 2014. Postcolonial Studies: An Anthology. Oxford: John Wiley. Ng˜ ug˜ı wa Thiong’o. 1972. “Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People.” Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics. London: Heinemann, pp. 51–4. Nnoli, Okwudiba. Ed. 1993. Dead-end to Nigerian Development: An Investigation on the Social, Economic and Political Crisis in Nigeria. Dakar: CODESRIA. Okafor, Kez. 1996. “The Quest for Social Change: Reformation or Revolution?” Eagle on Iroko: Selected Papers from the Chinua Achebe International Symposium 1990. Ed. Edith Ihekweazu Ibadan. Lagos: Heinemann Educational Books (Nigeria), pp. 224–33.

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Okolo, M.S.C. 2006. “Re-establishing the Basis of Social order in Africa: A Reflection on Achebe’s Reformist Agenda and Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Marxist Aesthetics.” Intellectuals and African Development: Pretension and Resistance in African Politics. Ed. Björn Beckman and Gbemisola Adeoti. London: Codresia in association with Zed Books, pp. 31–48. Olukoshi, Adebayo O. 1993. “General Introduction: From Crisis to Adjustment in Nigeria.” The Politics of Structural Adjustment in Nigeria. Ed. Adebayo O. Olukoshi. London: James Currey, pp. 1–15. Onimode, Bade. 1982. Imperialism and Underdevelopment in Nigeria: The Dialectics of Mass Poverty. London: Zed Books. ———. 1992. A Future for Africa: Beyond the Politics of Adjustment. London: Earthscan Publications. Parry, Benita. 2002. “Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies.” Relocating Postcolonialism. Ed. David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 66–81. ———. 2004. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London: Routledge. Richards, David. 1990. “Repossessing Time: Chinua Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah.” Kunapipi 12.2, 130–138. Sandwith, Corinne. 2016. “Frailties of the Flesh: Observing the Body in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” Research in African Literatures 47.1, 95–108. Sluga, Hans. 2008. “The Pluralism of the Political: From Carl Schmitt to Hannah Arendt.” Telos 142, 91–109. Soyinka, Wole. 1997. The Open Sore of a Continent: A Personal Narrative of the Nigerian Crisis. Oxford: Oxford UP. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. ———. 2003. Death of a Discipline. New York: Columbia U P. Stobie, Cheryl. 2010. “Dethroning the Infallible Father: Religion, Patriarchy and Politics in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus.” Literature and Theology 24.4, 421–435. Szeman, Imre. 2001. “Who’s Afraid of National Allegory? Jameson, Literary Criticism, Globalization.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3, 803–827. Trotsky, Leon. 1934. History of the Russian Revolution. Trans. Max Eastman. London: Victor Gollancz. Warwick Research Collective (WReC). 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto & Windus. Young, Robert. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion: The Counter-Counter-Revolution

General Olusegun Obasanjo is notorious for, among other things, stating that ‘Africa has become the third world of the Third World – a continent beyond the pale of the dominant movements of the 21st century’; ‘if it were to disappear in a flood the global effect would be approximately non-existent’.1 But this study has been trying to demonstrate that far from being outside of history, ‘globalisation’ somehow having passed it by, Africa has been thoroughly worked over by neoliberalism in the last four decades, just as imperialism methodically assailed the continent before that. The best histories of neoliberalism place Africa where it belongs, at the centre of the stage. Authoritarian regimes, pandemics, slums, ‘surplus’ populations, gilded elites—these things are not accidents or mistakes. They are intrinsic features of the workings of the capitalist world economy during the era of neoliberalism. That is the historical claim that this study has sought to get across. Structural adjustment and the vast transfer of capital from the poorest societies on earth to the very richest should be seen as one of the methods whereby the stagnating and crisis-ridden system of global capitalism sought to buy time and postpone its own demise with the aid of a continuing flow of cut-price primary commodities along with invigorating transfusions of third-world debt. This was a positively vampiric process of transferring wealth accumulated with the sweat and blood of the world’s most exploited men, women and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2_6

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children to government agencies in the North, creditors and the global financial institutions. Africa has thus been at the very forefront of what Graham Harrison characterises as neoliberalism’s ‘global social engineering’.2 Many of its states reduced to their police functions, its economies condemned to dependency on credit, aid and agro-mineral exports, doomed to miniscule tax bases and meagre accumulation, its elites gorged on privatisation sprees and on new sources of investment from East Asia, its infrastructure and services wasted or else non-existent, its populations segregated (in what Mike Davis calls the ‘late-capitalist triage of humanity’ [PS, 199]) into a handful of mega-rich plutocrats and a slum-stowed mass of informally employed paupers, Africa might be said to be at the vanguard of neoliberalism’s permanent counter-revolution, the ‘cutting edge’ as Harrison puts it of ‘neoliberalism-in-practice’. Unemployment, indebtedness, chronic insecurity, urban squalor, the destruction of social services and infrastructure, stratospheric levels of inequality, food insecurity and a degraded environment—these are becoming facts of life for many in the world’s richest societies too. To turn Marx’s formulation on its head, the underdeveloped world now shows the over-developed world ‘the image of its own future’.3 James Ferguson mordantly concludes his study of Africa’s place in the ‘neoliberal world order’ by stating that ‘African politics, so long misunderstood as backward, is starting to look very up-to-date indeed’.4 Those who are un-, under-, informally or formerly employed in the megacities of the third world, the evicted peasants, street vendors and casual labourers impoverished a generation ago by the vast tribute payments exacted by structural adjustment and condemned to permanent destitution by jobless economies, are not somehow outside the late capitalist world economy but a vital part of its durably uneven and catastrophic functioning. Fredric Jameson reminds us of the pertinence of what Marx in Capital calls ‘the absolute general law of capitalist accumulation’: the greater the social wealth the greater the ‘industrial reserve army’ of unemployed labourers ‘kept in misery in order to be always at the disposal of capital’.5 Capital, in Jameson’s ingenious reading of it, is actually ‘a book about unemployment’.6 Marx’s ‘doctrine of immiseration’ presented capitalism as a mode of production that cannot be reformed. By its very nature capitalism produces new value only by generating misery

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and unemployment on a global scale (RC, 130). This doctrine of immiseration ‘was the object of much mockery during the affluent post-war 1950s and 1960s. It is today no longer a joking matter’ (RC, 71). Jameson stresses with great eloquence the stark topicality of Marx’s dialectical analysis of the totality of capitalist accumulation, what he calls ‘the identity of productivity and misery’ (RC, 127). It suggests that those massive populations around the world who have, as it were, “dropped out of history,” who have been deliberately excluded from the modernizing projects of First-World capitalism and written off as hopeless or terminal cases, the subjects of so-called “failed states” (a new and self-serving pseudo-concept) or of ecological disasters or of old-fashioned survivals of allegedly immemorial, archaic “ethnic hatreds,” the victims of famine whether man-made or natural – all these populations at best confined in camps of various kinds, and ministered to by various NGOs and other sources of international philanthropy – our reading suggests that these populations, surely the vessels of a new kind of global and historical misery, will look rather different when considered in terms of the category of unemployment. (RC, 149)

These alternately pitied or despised populations, whether confined in migrant camps or crammed into gargantuan conurbations, are in fact the protagonists of contemporary world history whose dispossession and destitution at the hands of structural adjustment helped to generate late capitalism’s baleful spurt of accumulation in the belle époque of the 1990s and 2000s. Their capacity for political action might also presage ‘the invention of a new kind of transformatory politics on a global scale’ (RC, 151). Indeed Slavoj Žižek describes the amazing growth of third-world megacities as ‘perhaps the crucial geopolitical event of our times’.7 ‘We should be looking for signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the germs of the future’.8 Or at least, the liberationist projects of the future will emerge, as they already are doing, as Paul Mason shows, from alliances of young people (often graduates with vanishing prospects), slum-dwellers and precarious workers.9 The first wave of revolutionary protest in Africa brought independence, the promise of which was fatally constrained by a legacy of authoritarian state structures and relations of dependency in the economic sphere. The second wave of protests, this time against autocracy and austerity in the 1980s and 1990s, brought many postcolonial dictatorships to an

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end (ushering in multiparty elections and new constitutions), though this moment too failed to effect a permanent transformation of social, political and economic structures. The third wave of protest, beginning in the mid-2000s and continuing into the present, has emerged from South Africa to Egypt and from Nigeria to Ethiopia, Togo and Burkina Faso, indeed in literally dozens of countries across the continent. Writers and activists like Trevor Ngwane, Luke Sinwell and Immanuel Ness place these protests in the context of a global upsurge of anti-state, anti-austerity and even anti-capitalist movements over the last decade.10 Some commentators have wrongly seen the so-called Arab Spring as a specifically Middle Eastern and North African phenomenon and the anti-austerity as well as the short-lived Occupy movements as specifically European and North American phenomena. But are these quasi-uprisings in Africa not part of a fully global, if still incipient, response to the catastrophic crises of human development caused by neoliberal capitalism? This third wave of African protest is an intensely politicised response to extreme levels (especially among the young) of precariousness and deprivation, intensifying deindustrialisation, as well as the offensive juxtaposition of often rapid growth and colossal wealth alongside joblessness and collapsing infrastructure. The protests are also reactions to ‘the unaccountable and violent state power faced by Africa’s urban poor, often still unreformed under multiparty democracy’.11 Not always animated by unified political demands, these movements should nonetheless be characterised as rejections of the very powers to whom they might be expected to hold out a bowl and ask for more: the whole deep-rooted regime of neocolonial states, rapacious corporations, predatory financial institutions, two-faced donors and fraudulently ‘democratic’ national politicians. One could not wish for a better encapsulation of this militant approach than ‘The people demand the fall of the regime’, that brilliantly epigrammatic refrain of the Arab revolts. That slogan envisions not just the downfall of corrupt incumbents but also the systematic transformation of the state and of the exploitative economy over which the state presides. Protagonists in these movements include the urban underclass, who are subjected not just to intense economic deprivation but to acute political marginalisation as well, being alternately the victims of state neglect (since they enjoy very few political and legal rights) and targets of state coercion (such as the destruction of squatter settlements). How are they to ally themselves with other constituencies such as workers (including agricultural workers), students, women’s groups and indigenous peoples,

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in addition to similarly discontented groups in other parts of the world? We are faced today with a generalised and very profound crisis of political representation. Official ‘democratic’ structures are everywhere proving incapable of heeding and acting upon the demands made by disempowered groups. We should characterise the last four decades as a worldwide ‘neoliberal counter-revolution’, to use David Havey’s term, against the democratic-egalitarian aspirations of socialism and anti-colonial liberation.12 Perhaps if Africa has been at the vanguard of neoliberalism then its peoples’ continuing struggles against this state of affairs might also make it the advanced guard of the counter-counter-revolution. Neoliberalism was first imposed but also first resisted in Africa. Is it possible to imagine global alliances between those who find themselves members of the relatively privileged first-world salariat that has lost rights and is alienated and overworked, the larger category of those who are un- or under- or precariously employed, as well as the even vaster category of those reduced to extreme levels of destitution and dispossession in the megacities and ruthlessly enclosed rural areas of the underdeveloped world? What unites, say, the middle-aged man working on a zero-hours contract at or below the minimum wage in a retail warehouse in a postindustrial town in the North of England, the young woman braving stun grenades and armoured personnel carriers on the streets of Ferguson or Philadelphia to assert the elementary principle that black lives matter, a landless farmer in the Philippines who sees land previously earmarked for redistribution instead being enclosed by a sugar estate, or a resident of an informal settlement in central Lagos whose home is bulldozed by the state government so the land can be handed over to property developers? Very little of course, except for the fact that they have a common enemy: capitalism in its moribund late or neoliberal phase. The world economy has been substantially restructured since the 1970s in order to facilitate much more extensive and intensive exploitation. This restructuring foiled the revolutionary prospect of a fundamental reorganisation of the world economy and of its states’ largely undemocratic political structures that had been envisaged by many anti-colonial movements. States and corporations in the Global North have since then presided over a worldwide regime of jobless growth, with either debt peonage or exploitative wage labour reserved for the peoples of the South and inequality, stagnating living standards and debt-fuelled consumerism reserved for those of the North. The world economy is trapped in what Prashad calls a ‘satanic symbiosis’ between exploited third-world

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workers and underpaid, over-credited first-world consumers.13 Today’s most important political task, then, as Göran Therborn argues, is the construction of alliances against inequality and exploitation and against the unaccountable and increasingly militarised states that underwrite this regime: pre-capitalist populations, fighting to retain their territory and means of subsistence; ‘surplus’ masses, excluded from formal employment in the circuits of capitalist production; exploited manufacturing workers across rustbelt and sunbelt zones; new and old middle classes, increasingly encumbered with debt payments to the financial corporations – these constitute the potential social bases for contemporary critiques of the ruling capitalist order.14

 Sovereignty for Carl Schmitt is essentially the power to declare a state of emergency: it is the dictatorial and often lethal prerogative to decide the exception between citizens and non-citizens. For Schmitt’s most formidable interlocutor, Walter Benjamin, such states of emergency are therefore intrinsic to what state sovereignty in its essence is and does: ‘[t]he tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’. Dictatorship is not, as it was supposed to be in the Roman Republic, a brief emergency during which normal political and legal procedures are suspended. It strives towards permanence. Benjamin therefore suggests that ‘it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency’, one that imperils dictatorship itself.15 He places his trust in the way that the continuous reality of oppression calls forth equally dogged traditions of counter-struggle. This is certainly a lesson that these novels have taught us: the task they set us is to bring about a real crisis. For most of the planet’s peoples crisis is the norm so we need to will a great refusal of that system and initiate a turn to anti-systemic alternatives, by which term, remember, I am referring to the proposals set out by Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence K. Hopkins for political projects that finally fulfil the aspiration of the ‘global 1960s’ for democratically organised political and economic structures within nation states and for a more egalitarian and polycentric world-system.16 The key strategy for anti-systemic movements is to pioneer democratic and ‘horizontalist’ forms of power before, during and after a successful

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struggle with the concentrated power of the state and of capital. ‘Prefiguration’ requires that cooperatives, popular assemblies, self-governing and autonomous communities, forms of direct democracy that are indebted to indigenous traditions as well as anarchist and socialist ones, should be set up now and should then be immediately and very widely encouraged by an incumbent anti-systemic administration. And if ‘anti-systemic administration’ sounds like an oxymoron then that is because we also need to face up to the difficult necessity of first taking power at the level of existing nation states in order to quell power and disperse it. I hope it does not sound too uncomradely to state that we are being unforgivably naïve and we are condemning ourselves at best to marginalisation or, more likely, to total defeat if we imagine, as Marina Sitrin seems to, that ‘horizontalist’ forms of democratic empowerment can be initiated without first taking on the alliance between state and capital that currently works untiringly across the globe to centralise power and prevent its dispersal. [C]ontemporary autonomous movements are attempting to organize themselves outside of the state and traditional forms of hierarchical and institutional power. These movements are against capitalism, hierarchy, and concepts of power as a dominating force […] They desire neither changes from the state nor to change the state itself. Rather, implicit in their politics is to live in a substantially different society. One of the core differences is the relationship to concepts of power, and particularly the understanding of state power as a potential force of liberation. These contemporary autonomous movements explicitly state that they do not want to take state power and that the change they desire cannot come from state apparatuses.17

But what Sitrin does not seem to appreciate is that if radical movements of opposition don’t exercise state power somebody else certainly will. We might forget about the state but the state won’t forget about us.  Neoliberalism, understood as a decades-long counter-revolution, names the reactionary ‘hatred of democracy’18 (to use Jacques Rancière’s resonant phrase). The novels I have been reading identify democracy as an indispensable aspect of an authentically postcolonial utopia. In Africa of course, as I have been anxious to stress, structural adjustment was one episode in a recurring sequence of scrambles for that continent. But it is not only this dispiriting sequence that these novels have emphasised

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but also the reality of struggle and the continued availability of alternatives. The goal of this study was not to formulate theories of dictatorship and democracy that could then be applied to several novels. Instead, my aim was to catch up theoretically and politically with what the novels already know. I wanted to identify what the nascent theory of dictatorship lacks, namely, an understanding of the democratic ideals and practices that dictatorship exists in order to fight off. If a democratic utopia is often obliquely forecasted by these novels then that obliquity can be attributed to the greater urgency of their most salient theme: the state’s undiminished power, presence and intransigence in the age of neoliberalism, and behind the state the enduringly dictatorial world-system itself. Everywhere in the postcolonial world in the 1960s and 1970s, from Algeria to Cuba and from Vietnam and Guinea-Bissau and other newly or soon-to-be independent states too numerous to list, there were discussions and struggles of various kinds to elaborate democratic and decentralised alternatives to the bureaucratic and one-party rule of new national elites. I take Lazarus’s point that Frantz Fanon’s classic The Wretched of the Earth (1961) exaggerated the extent to which Algerian workers and peasants had been unified and radicalised during the war of liberation. Events disproved Fanon’s prediction that they were destined to intensify that revolutionary struggle after independence by establishing a democratic socialist society.19 Nonetheless there were valiant attempts to theorise democratic alternatives to authoritarianism and to put those plans into action. Fanon’s great study of decolonisation overestimated, consciously or otherwise, the revolutionary (as opposed to merely tactical or expedient) unity of the Algerian people during the war against France and he probably overstated their commitment to a specifically socialist form of liberation. But he did not downplay, indeed he emphasised very insistently, the immense struggle that it was necessary to wage against the betrayals and prevarications of newly empowered and privileged social groups that might simply assume control of the colonial state apparatus. The great flaw of the national liberation project in Algeria and elsewhere, as Vijay Prashad has argued, was the assumption that with the achievement of independence the people, whose radical commitment and whose initiative and capacity for innovation had been considered essential during the struggle, ought now to be demobilised. Political and economic power would henceforth be centralised in the state. We are talking in the context of Algeria about a radical state, to be sure, one controlled by a national liberation movement sincerely committed to progressive

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and egalitarian objectives. But at the same time and undeniably it was also a state that was destined to incubate a privileged and self-interested caste because it felt it really had no need for the mobilisation and participation of the great mass of the people. The Front de libération nationale rapidly concentrated power in the hands of the presidency and prohibited rival parties and independent trade unions. Self-managed farms and factories were soon placed under the control of the Ministry of National Economy. The energetic experiments in decentralised production and political education that Fanon describes so enthusiastically in The Wretched of the Earth were permitted to peter out. Bureaucratisation, the growth of strong links between the ruling party and the bourgeoisie, the demobilisation of popular energies and the return of the people to traditional authorities and associations were all features of the early years of Algerian independence. The regime might have changed course, as Prashad speculates when surveying the wave of strikes in 1964 and Ben Bella’s rapprochement with the unions and with the communists, but we will never know because the army seized power in 1965.20 While the military regime thereafter maintained its commitment to a welfarist version of socialism funded by the country’s oil and gas production it disavowed the experiments in workers’ self-management and refrained from challenging the privileges of the bourgeoisie. Fanon warned his readers of such dangers. For the national elites elevated to power in postcolonial Africa, independence entails simply ‘the transfer into native hands of those unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period’ (WoE, 122). Because it is drawn from the privileged segment of the population most favoured by the colonial regime and because it is accustomed to playing a subservient role in a dependent economy, the national middle class shows itself after independence to be incapable of bringing about economic development (except of the most uneven kind), let alone of redistributing wealth and power. The new leaders’ impatience for returns leads them to accept the conditions of the former colonial power and settle for dependency. They eagerly play the role of intermediary and carry on exporting products and raw materials to Europe; such profits or rents as accrue to them are destined not for reinvestment but for foreign bank accounts and for the purchase of useless consumer goods and lavish lifestyles. This harmful class will monopolise power, retain the colonisers’ oppressive laws, waste money on expenses and grandiose construction projects, divisively favour the capital city over rural areas, transform the ruling party into a buffer between the masses

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and their leaders as well as a device for enriching the rulers’ hangers on, and in order to divide and rule they will exacerbate ethnic rivalries. The regime will turns its back on the people, Fanon predicts; it elicits their compliance and prolongs its own domination by exhibiting the figure of the leader, who may, like Nkrumah, Mugabe or Kenyatta, be a proven patriot and may even sincerely believe that the regime’s supremacy represents the culmination and guarantee of the struggle for liberation, but who is now little more than a cover or alibi for the interests of the new ruling class. The leader pacifies the people. For years on end after independence has been won, we see him, incapable of urging on the people to a concrete task, unable really to open the future to them or of flinging them into the path of national reconstruction, that is to say, of their own reconstruction; we see him reassessing the history of independence and recalling the sacred unity of the struggle for liberation […] The leader, seen objectively, brings the people to a halt and persists in either expelling them from history or preventing them from taking root in it. (WoE, 36)

In postcolonial Africa, in short, the colonial state was reinforced when it ought to have been dismantled. The structure of colonial rule was retained because it facilitated returns for the nominally departed powers and their local intermediaries. The rhetoric of national unity was therefore used as an alibi for unaltered hierarchy and for the indefinite postponement both of democratisation and of more equitable forms of economic development. What has received rather less attention than this prescient examination of the drawbacks of nation-statism is Fanon’s equally detailed exploration of the potential antidotes to these maladies. For Fanon, it was wholesale democratisation and the increasing internationalisation of institutions and outlooks that pointed the way beyond dictatorship and underdevelopment. Fanon contends not only that nationalism is an insufficient condition of liberation but that after independence it becomes positively counterproductive and degenerates into sectarianism. Moreover, he is quite clear about the connection between imperialism and capitalism and is equally convinced that after independence they will not leave the new nation in peace. It was partly his awareness that the gains secured by national independence might be halted or even rolled back that led Fanon to think through strategies by which the new nations might combine in

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order to ward off encirclement and ‘recolonization’, and might even ally themselves with the peoples of Europe in order to bring an end to the exploitative practices of imperialism. The struggle against imperialism is a global one. ‘A colonized people’, Fanon writes, ‘is not alone’ (WoE, 55). When nationalism and statism outstay their welcome the process of liberation grinds to a halt. For the more the head of state regales them with memories of the struggle and the more he pacifies them with demands for discipline, patience, increased productivity and faith in the wisdom and integrity of their leaders, the more likely it is that the people’s previously awakened consciousness will be lulled back to sleep. The more obedient they are to the merely abstract idea of the nation, the less the people think to hold the nation’s new leaders to the concrete promises made during the struggle, including promises to make the country more equal, to reform its laws, to provide jobs and services, to tackle the oppression of women and to introduce democracy in government and in the workplace. Nationalism will then become a distraction from the pressing tasks facing the people. Therefore independence, Fanon is at very great pains to stress, should not be an end but a beginning. In other words, the work of decolonisation has barely begun when the Union flag or the French tricolour is lowered. For Fanon, independence ought to fire the starting gun on a prodigious effort of reconstruction and transformation: ‘Decolonisation sets out to change the world’ (WoE, 27). The alternative to dictatorship and dependency is to be found, firstly, in internationalism, that is, in alliances between the states and peoples of the decolonising world based on the solidarity of shared interests. Secondly, dictatorship will be prevented by radical democratisation or ‘decentralization in the extreme’ (WoE, 159). The people must empower themselves to resist the priorities of the new ruling strata which, thinly veiled, are those of the former colonial power. This means carrying out the essential projects required to lift the nation out of underdevelopment such as education, the building of infrastructure, the engagement of the unemployed and of the young, none of which can be achieved without first securing the assent and commitment that only democratic participation can elicit. Courses of action must be decided and carried out democratically or not at all, as Fanon emphasises in what is a wonderfully evocative and suggestive example or analogy of the inextricable connection between development and democratisation:

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If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then that bridge ought not to be built and the citizens can go on swimming across the river or going by boat. The bridge should not be ‘parachuted down’ from above; it should not be imposed by a deus ex machina upon the social scene; on the contrary it should come from the muscles and brains of the citizens. (WoE, 162)

‘Fanon’s bridge’ has been my personal thought figure for the democratisation of postcolonial states since long before I even conceived of this study. Development and liberation, it indicates, are not impersonal forces or abstract goals in the service of which people must surrender their volition. On the contrary, the economic development required to liberate the people from poverty must be directed by the citizenry in whose name it is undertaken, consciously and in their own interests rather than by cadres or bureaucrats. Thus political education must be aimed not at inculcating the self-seeking priorities of the nation’s rulers but at encouraging responsibility, initiative and critical awareness. Instead of stagnating, the people for Fanon must devise initiatives and institutions that help them to fight consciously against poverty, hunger, illiteracy, inhumanity and the exploitation of women. All this entails what Fanon calls ‘a rapid step […] from national consciousness to political and social consciousness’ (WoE, 163). Development for Fanon is never simply the imitation of some European model of ‘modernisation’. Development means something more like a process of enriching the lives and capacities of people. That process undoubtedly involves a more conventional understanding of the term, including economic prosperity and the building of infrastructure as well as modern systems of education and healthcare. But ‘the truth is’, in the Tanzanian independence leader Julius Nyerere’s invaluable dictum, ‘development means the development of people’.21 It does not mean adding more noughts to a nation’s GDP, unless that figure represents material advances that are directed and controlled by the people, or unless these material advances help to unfasten the people from the wheel of ‘progress’ to which imperialism had bound them. The alternative to continued domination and dependency then, is comprehensive liberation in all spheres of life, including both the political and the economic, from agendas determined by self-appointed authorities and elites: “The last shall be first and the first last” (WoE, 37), in Fanon’s Biblical synopsis of his vision.

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Another of the most radical theorists of anti-colonial liberation, the Guinea-Bissauan revolutionary and intellectual Amilcar Cabral, advocated democratic organisation even in the midst of a life or death struggle against Portuguese colonialism.22 Time and again Cabral’s writings stress the importance of explanation, exposition and dialogue as means of refining a revolutionary platform and of imbuing a people with the political resources to take charge of their society after independence. Without democratic self-organisation the people could not be mobilised, the war could not be won and decolonisation would be nothing but a change of masters. We don’t accept any institution of the Portuguese colonialists. We are not interested in the preservation of any of the structures of the colonial state. It is our opinion that it is necessary to totally destroy, to break, to reduce to ash all aspects of the colonial state in our country in order to make everything possible for our people.23

Popular participation must therefore be fostered in the course of the struggle so that the people could be in a position to resist their leaders’ inclination simply to take charge of the colonial state once independence was achieved. The aim of liberation, in Basil Davidson’s words, is ‘their self-transformation into citizens’, as opposed to subjects.24 The fact that this utopian dream of popular participation did not happen does not mean that it couldn’t have happened, let alone that it shouldn’t have happened or that Fanon’s and Cabral’s ideals were somehow misguided. It does not even mean that leaders who subsequently succumbed to bureaucratisation and palace coups bore a larger share of the responsibility for it not happening than the colonial and neocolonial powers that have conspired for generations to stamp out democracy in Africa. ‘The problem of the nature of the state created after independence is perhaps the secret of the failure of African independence’, suggests Cabral.25 This statement is axiomatic for the present study. Plans to move from national emancipation into real democratic participation and into anti-colonial alliances (into Fanon’s social consciousness and international consciousness) were not doomed to failure. ‘Nothing came of them’, Davidson admits. ‘But with active official support and promotion, something might have come of them’.26 That what happened to Africa after independence could have happened differently—that independence

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could, in fact, have resulted not in continued oppression and exploitation but instead in what I am trying to show was the authentic goal of liberation, which was in Davidson’s words ‘a gradual dismantlement of the nation-statist legacy’27 —is at once a lesson about Africa’s past and a guide to its potential liberation in the future. For the Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio, democracy is a word used to describe the full participation of interested parties in collective decision-making, in the political and the economic spheres, in addition to the procedural rules that make this possible. Democracy’s purpose is to limit the oppressive potential inherent in state power not only by improving the chances of making good decisions but by making it possible to revise and reverse decisions. State power becomes dictatorial when it frees itself from these constraints. The aim of the Left should therefore be not so much the state’s ownership of the means of production but the rapid democratisation of every source of entrenched and unaccountable power. ‘Today, if you want an indication of the development of democracy in a country, you must consider not just the number of people with the right to vote, but also the number of different places besides the traditional areas of politics in which the right to vote is exercised’.28 Bobbio calls this state of affairs substantive as opposed to merely formal democracy. From a less liberal perspective, indeed from the perspective of a defence of some of the claims and objectives of classical Marxism, Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that democracy is nothing other than ‘rule by the demos ’, the application of free and collective decision-making to all spheres of economic and social life.29 Not only must we ensure that existing political structures become much more democratic we also need to extend democratic decision-making to the economic sphere of relations between capital and labour. The power of private property that is currently vested in the process of production and in the political structure of the state must be dispersed. To that extent, as Meiksins Wood argues, socialism and democracy are synonymous, democracy being an economic category as much as a political one. The process of dispersing power, of ensuring that every significant source of social, economic and political power is subjected to democratic accountability, has been described by Naomi Klein as the task of founding ‘an alternative participatory democracy’.30 Globally speaking, there is an impressive variety of initiatives for bringing about economic democracy, from local production units in rural areas to the worker cooperatives and solidarity economies that are already emerging in places

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ranging from Brazil, India, Columbia and Mozambique. These are forms of organisation in which associated workers control their own time, their own processes and their own products. They endeavour to protect local cultures and environments at the same time as they construct broader networks of support at the national and international levels. As Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César Rodríguez-Garavito have argued, ‘the considerable political leverage needed to replace neoliberal institutions with democratic egalitarian ones at the national and international levels can come only from the transnational mobilization of social movement organizations and the increasingly large masses of people that are excluded from the benefits of social citizenship’.31 It goes without saying that this is a herculean task. Nonetheless these experiments are taking place right now and are already effecting real change in people’s lives. Africans are faced, as we all are to varying extents, by a choice between existing states and what Leo Panitch has called a ‘different kind of state’.32 The aim is not to simply hijack the state and prolong its power. In the words of de Sousa Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, alternative movements cannot afford to choose between fighting inside or outside the state. They must fight on both fronts. They must work within the state to avoid losing political ground to the economic elites, and mobilize state resources to improve the lot of the marginalized classes, while continuing to work outside the sphere of the state to safeguard their own integrity, avoid dependence on political cycles, and continue to defend alternatives to the status quo.33

In Africa, as in the rest of the world, the state functions to compel acceptance of the logic of capital. ‘[L]et us have less nation and more state’, writes Tim Brennan, summarising the line taken by those political leaders whose states have surrendered before that logic but who remain ready to coerce their own citizens.34 Speaking generally, the state hasn’t really retreated in Africa. Rather, it has left the goals of development behind and dedicated itself all the more zealously to the twin tasks of coercion and private enrichment. But the state can be managed in the other direction too. Africans might substitute more responsive and accountable state structures for the oppressive states handed down by European imperialism. A ‘reconstituted’ African state, to use Pita Ogaba Agbese and George Klay Kieh Jr’s word, might be employed to start the work of development and democratisation. Among the progressive tasks that the

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state might be expected to perform in such circumstances are the control of some of the major means of production in order to engineer economic development (which for these purposes means the reduction of poverty), the redistribution of wealth, the promulgation of laws and regulations, the repudiation of neoliberalism and its ‘asphyxiating’ institutions, and the fostering of ‘new pluralistic-centric institutions’.35  My readings of Wizard of the Crow, Waiting for the Wild Beasts to Vote, Anthills of the Savannah and Purple Hibiscus sought to explicate the different ways in which all four novels represent the dictatorial state as a vexingly persistent feature of postcolonial African history. Postcolonial criticism has not always paid enough attention to the political question of the nature and origins of state power or to the question of what the democratic alternatives to authoritarian state power might be. So I have tried to rectify this neglect, though without falling into the trap of portraying that power as inexorable. State power has not been ‘decentred’ and ‘dispersed’ in a world that has somehow surmounted older divisions between imperial centre and colonised periphery and between rulers and ruled. The brief history of neoliberalism in Africa offered by chapter two tried to explain the history these novels dramatise, one that disproves such onesided narratives. Africa, we saw, was effectively ‘recolonised’ in the years after independence as part of a worldwide project to augment the power of capital in response to a crisis of profitability that befell the world-system in the 1970s. These novels stress the durability of state power in the era of neoliberalism plus the availability of alternatives. Kourouma’s and Ng˜ ug˜ı’s texts, for example, perform power in order to accentuate power’s resilience but also its vulnerability to critique and contestation, not least (potentially) from the novels’ own readers who find themselves armed with a knowledge of dictatorship’s origins in the unrelentingly imperialist world-system. The novels also assume the modestly utopian or at least anticipatory function of glimpsing a comprehensively democratic future, in the shape of radical political alliances between disenfranchised groups in Waiting for the Wild Beasts and Wizard of the Crow; of prophetic and auspicious explorations of political alliances in Anthills of the Savannah; of the aptitudes of democratic citizenship nurtured in civil society institutions such as the Church, the university and the family in Purple Hibiscus; and of forms that in all four texts contrast dictatorship’s pretension to omnipotence with satirical and ironical voices, multiple points of view

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and disobedient and even rebellious narrators. These novels do not so much sketch a more democratic and egalitarian future as find ways of drawing attention to the contingency and vulnerability of the hierarchical structures that prevail in the present. They vindicate Jacqueline Rose’s statement that ‘[t]he political edge of fiction is its ability to undo one thing, so that we can imagine something other, something better, in its place’.36 Each novel is an accessory to the essentially political task, which none of them undertake (for how could they?) or even fully envision, of finally subjecting state power in the ‘postcolony’ and, behind state power, the similarly dictatorial but faltering imperialist world-system, to democratic accountability. Since the capitalist world-system itself provides the key to understanding them, these dictator novels therefore provide yet more evidence for Fredric Jameson’s bold assertion that Marxism, in this case the work of Marxist political economists on the continuities and mutations in the world economy over the last forty odd years, provides the ‘absolute horizon’ of literary interpretation.37 The work of figures like Giovanni Arrighi, John Saul and Immanuel Wallerstein helps us to account for both the local and the global struggles enacted in these novels. Yet we should keep in mind that the reverse is also true: the absolute horizon of the world-system would have remained abstract and indistinct had we not approached it through these novels and, by so doing, gained a greater sense of the concrete ways in which these struggles are being fought out and therefore at the same time a much clearer appreciation than political economy can give us of the visions, aspirations and possibilities that are being staked in those struggles. I want to end by stressing just how radical the political possibilities brought into view by these fictions really are. Eugene, remember, in Purple Hibiscus, is the recipient of a ‘human rights award’ (PH , 5). What that novel carefully explores is an alternative to the merely partial or rhetorical commitment to what Eugene grandly but vaguely calls ‘Renewed Democracy’ and to the largely depoliticising and superficial or at least, as Samuel Moyn has comprehensively shown, insufficient rhetoric of human rights. Adichie asks us to countenance or envisage, through the example of her protagonists’ growing defiance, criticality and eloquence (the distinguishing aptitudes conducive to authentic political action), a more substantive and comprehensive vision of democratic empowerment. After the 1970s, as Moyn has shown, human rights discourse filled the political gap left by the retreat of European social democracy and the

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defeat of liberationist projects in the postcolonial world. Human rights talk plus ‘the rule of law’ and the ‘open society’ became useful ideological weapons in the renewed offensive against the ‘totalitarian’ USSR under Carter and Reagan and later became alibis for American militarism at the time of the bombings and invasions of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. With its narrow focus on legal equality and with calling out the harshest abuses of state power such as imprisonment, torture and genocide, the human rights paradigm exposed itself as a ‘powerless companion of market fundamentalism’: ‘Neoliberalism has changed the world, while the human rights movement has posed no threat to it’.38 That movement tends to ignore subaltern resistance movements and it seems to have forgotten the much more radical proposals of liberation enshrined in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1966. The human rights paradigm is too often silent about the grievous violations of human and other rights by groups that, though they are not states, nonetheless wield enormous if not greater power, that is, corporations, comprador elites and the international financial institutions. Equality is a principle, in short, as Moyn argues, that has substantive meaning only when it is observed in the economic as well as the political sphere and when it is given substantive force rather than just formal legal acknowledgement. As we have seen, this is how the proposals for a New International Economic Order envisaged decolonisation in the 1970s.39 Decolonisation signifies far more than protection from the most grievous abuses of state power. It means redistribution as well as the subjection of concentrated political and economic power to democratic accountability. The term for this is not human rights, ‘a worldwide slogan in a time of downsized ambition’ (NE, 6), but socialism, which is the ‘central language of justice’. Finally, the literary critical readings that form the main part of this study constitute further evidence for Jacques Rancière’s striking claim in his The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction that the true radicalism of fiction is to be found not at the level of theme or content, of what novels show ‘realistically’ or claim ideologically, but at the level of form where they construct what Rancière calls logics of equality. Put differently, these novels seek to effect ‘a destruction of the hierarchical model’ of political life that divides ‘humanity between an elite of active beings and a multitude of passive ones’.40 The struggles they dramatise are directly political ones, for the seizure and reform or reconstitution of

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state power and for the final fulfilment of the democratic goals of anticolonial liberation. In each of these chapters I have therefore had cause to try and set these texts free from the clutches of critics who have presented them as narratives about ‘decentring’ and ‘hybridity’. Often inspired by Mbembe’s reflections on the ‘postcolony’ such readings seek to show how African fictions dismantle oppositions between rulers and ruled. But the struggle to overturn the persistence of imperialist power in Africa is, these novels all insist, unfinished. I cannot agree with G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı that by the end of Wizard of the Crow, for example, ‘the people’ have become ‘free subjects’.41 This isn’t even a misreading; it is simply a description of what does not happen in that novel or in any of my other texts, like saying that Hamlet or Okonkwo live happily ever after. The neoliberal period now stands revealed as an attempt to strangle the revolutionary threat of decolonisation at birth. Faced with such consequential developments at the global level, that I have tried to show are traced, exposed, elucidated and contested by the fictions discussed in these pages, postcolonial criticism is surely obliged to respond, as Terry Eagleton has remarked in a related context, with ‘answerable resources of its own, equal in depth and scope to the situation it confronts’.42 To misquote Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard, the imperialist regime of capital is still big: it’s postcolonial theory that got small! It got side-tracked by imaginary or superficial processes of ‘hybridisation’ and ‘decentring’, distracted from what these novels shows us are by far the most salient realities for any scholar of postcolonial literatures, distracted, that is, from the continuities of imperialist power on a continental and even global scale and from the lasting possibilities of comprehensive liberation. To close each of these novels is to confront the world newly invigorated by knowledge of dictatorship’s origins and emboldened by an awareness of the possibility of alternatives.

Notes 1. Quoted in Nana K. Poku and Anna Mdee, Politics in Africa: A New Introduction, London: Zed Books, 2011, p. 29. 2. Graham Harrison, Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering, London: Zed Books, 2010, p. 4. 3. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976 [1867], p. 91. 4. Ferguson, Global Shadows, p. 210.

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5. See also Immanuel Ness, Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class, London: Pluto Press, 2016. 6. Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One, London: Verso, 2011, p. 2. Subsequent references are given in the main text after RC. 7. Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes, London: Verso, 2008, p. 424. 8. Ibid., p. 426. 9. Paul Mason, Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions, second edition, London: Verso, 2013, p. 68. 10. See Trevor Ngwane, Luke Sinwell and Immanuel Ness, eds., Urban Revolt: State Power and the Rise of People’s Movements in the Global South, Chicago: Haymarkets Books, 2017; Peter Dwyer and Leo Zeilig, African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence, Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012; and Ray Bush, Poverty and Neoliberalism: Persistence and Reproduction in the Global South, London: Pluto, 2007. 11. Branch and Mampilly, Africa Uprising, p. 72. 12. David Harvey, Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, London: Profile, 2014, p. 129. 13. Prashad, The Poorer Nations, p. 205. 14. Göran Therborn, ‘New Masses? Social Bases of Resistance’, New Left Review, 85 (2014), 7–16 (p. 16). 15. Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, p. 248. 16. Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence K. Hopkins, AntiSystemic Movements, London: Verso, 1989. 17. Marina Sitrin, ‘Goals Without Demands: The New Movements for Real Democracy’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 113:2 (2014), 245–258 (p. 256). 18. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran, London: Verso, 2006. 19. Lazarus, The Postcolonial Unconscious, p. 176. 20. Prashad, The Darker Nations, p. 132. 21. Julius Nyerere, Freedom and Development: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1968–1973, Dar es Salaam: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 59, emphasis in the original. 22. In Patrick Chabal’s words about Cabral, ‘the political agency for building the new society, must be created before, not after, independence’. Patrick Chabal, Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 177. 23. Amilcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches, New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1973, p. 83. 24. Basil Davidson, The People’s Cause: A History of Guerillas in Africa, Harlow: Longman, 1981, p. 161. 25. Cabral, Return to the Source, p. 84, emphasis in the original.

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26. Davidson, The Black Man’s Burden, p. 184. 27. Ibid., pp. 321–322. 28. Norberto Bobbio, Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power, trans. Peter Kennealy, Cambridge: Polity, 1989, p. 157. 29. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism, London: Verso, 2016 [1995], p. 232. 30. Klein argues that neoliberal globalisation, which has meant the privatisation and monopolisation of wealth and power in fewer and fewer hands, ‘is in essence a crisis in representative democracy. What has caused this crisis? One of the basic reasons for it is the way power and decision-making have been handed along to points ever further away from citizens: from local to provincial, from provincial to national, from national to international institutions, that lack all transparency or accountability. What is the solution? To articulate an alternative, participatory democracy.’ Naomi Klein, ‘Reclaiming the Commons’, A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible? London: Verso, 2004, pp. 219–229 (p. 225). 31. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César Rodríguez-Garavito, ‘Introduction: Expanding the Economic Canon and Searching for Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization’, Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, London: Verso, 2006, pp. xvii–lxii (p. xviii). 32. A participatory democracy, as Leo Panitch argues, would not only be better than a merely consultative democracy at the level of content (it would stand a better chance of making good decisions) but would also be superior at the level of form (since citizens would be imbued with a sense of their own capacities and freedoms). ‘A dynamic democracy is… one that encourages the development of human capacities – above all, our collective capacities for creating a social order governed by justice’. Leo Panitch, ‘A Different Kind of State?’ A Different Kind of State? Popular Power and Democratic Administration, Gregory Albo, David Langille and Leo Panitch, Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 2–16 (p. 15). 33. Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito, ‘Introduction: Expanding the Economic Canon and Searching for Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization’, p. lii. 34. Ibid. 35. Agbese and Klay Kieh, Jr., ‘State Renewal in Africa: The Lessons’, p. 286. 36. Jacqueline Rose, ‘The Political Edge of Fiction’, in Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, ed. Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Ba¸sak Ertür. London: Verso, 2008, pp. 15–29 (p. 28). 37. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 17. 38. Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018, p. 216. Subsequent references are given in the main text after NE. Moyn’s argument is not that human rights are unimportant or, as Jodi Dean claims, that they

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40. 41.

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are just an alibi for market fundamentalism, but that they are insufficient if not combined with social and economic rights and with political struggle to reform the states that are currently charged, often very optimistically, with guaranteeing those rights. See Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. On the superior radicalism of anti-colonial liberation see Moyn’s chapter on ‘Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement’, in The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 84–119. Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction, trans. By Steven Corcoran, London: Bloomsbury, 2017, p. xxxiii. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, ‘Performing Resistance in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow’, in Unmasking the African Dictator, ed. Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, pp. 184–205 (p. 204). Terry Eagleton, After Theory, London: Allen Lane, 2003, p. 222.

References Agbese, Pita Ogaba and George Klay Kieh, Jr. 2007. “State Renewal in Africa: The Lessons.” Reconstituting the State in Africa. Ed. Pita Ogaba Agbese and George Klay Kieh, Jr. London: Palgrave, pp. 279–294. Arrighi, Giovanni, Immanuel Wallerstein and Terence K. Hopkins. 1989. AntiSystemic Movements. London: Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1992. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Fontana, pp. 245–255. Bobbio, Norberto. 1989. Democracy and Dictatorship: The Nature and Limits of State Power. Trans. Peter Kennealy. Cambridge: Polity. Branch, Adam and Zachariah Mampilly. 2015. Africa Uprising: Popular Protest and Political Change. London: Zed Books. Bush, Ray. 2007. Poverty and Neoliberalism: Persistence and Reproduction in the Global South. London: Pluto. Cabral, Amilcar. 1973. Return to the Source: Selected Speeches. New York and London: Monthly Review Press. Chabal, Patrick. 1983. Amilcar Cabral: Revolutionary Leadership and People’s War. Cambridge UP. Davidson, Basil. 1981. The People’s Cause: A History of Guerillas in Africa. Harlow: Longman. ———. 1992. The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State. London: James Currey. Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP.

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Dwyer, Peter and Leo Zeilig. 2012. African Struggles Today: Social Movements Since Independence. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Eagleton, Terry. 2003. After Theory. London: Allen Lane. Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham: Duke UP. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı. 2016. “Performing Resistance in Ng˜ ug˜ı’s Wizard of the Crow.” Unmasking the African Dictator: Essays on Postcolonial African Literature. Ed. G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı. Knoxville: The U of Tennessee P, pp. 184–205. Harrison, Graham. 2010. Neoliberal Africa: The Impact of Global Social Engineering. London: Zed Books. Harvey, David. 2014. Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism. London: Profile. Jameson, Fredric. [1981] 1996. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Routledge. ———. 2011. Representing Capital: A Commentary on Volume One. London: Verso. Klein, Naomi. 2004. “Reclaiming the Commons.” A Movement of Movements: Is Another World Really Possible? London: Verso, pp. 219–229. Lazarus, Neil. 2011. The Postcolonial Unconscious. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin. Mason, Paul. 2013. Why It’s Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. Second edition. London: Verso. Meiksins Wood, Ellen. [1995] 2016. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. London: Verso. Moyn, Samuel. 2010. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP. ———. 2018. Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World. Cambridge, Ma: Harvard UP. Ness, Immanuel. 2016. Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class. London: Pluto Press. Ngwane, Trevor, Luke Sinwell and Immanuel Ness. Eds. 2017. Urban Revolt: State Power and the Rise of People’s Movements in the Global South. Chicago: Haymarket Books. Nyerere, Julius. 1973. Freedom and Development: A Selection from Writings and Speeches, 1968–1973. Dar es Salaam: Oxford UP. Panitch, Leo. 1993. “A Different Kind of State?” A Different Kind of State? Popular Power and Democratic Administration. Ed. Gregory Albo, David Langille and Leo Panitch. Toronto: Oxford UP, pp. 2–16. Poku, Nana K. and Anna Mdee. 2011. Politics in Africa: A New Introduction. London: Zed Books. Prashad, Vijay. 2007. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. London: Verso.

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———. 2014. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. London: Verso. Rancière, Jacques. 2006. Hatred of Democracy. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London: Verso. ———. 2017. The Lost Thread: The Democracy of Modern Fiction. Trans. Steven Corcoran. London: Bloomsbury. Rose, Jacqueline. 2008. “The Political Edge of Fiction.” Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said. Ed. Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Ba¸sak Ertür. London: Verso, pp. 15–29. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa and César Rodríguez-Garavito. 2006. “Introduction: Expanding the Economic Canon and Searching for Alternatives to Neoliberal Globalization.” Another Production is Possible: Beyond the Capitalist Canon. Ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos. London: Verso, pp. xvii–lxii. Sitrin, Marina. 2014. “Goals Without Demands: The New Movements for Real Democracy.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 113.2, 245–258. Therborn, Göran. 2014. “New Masses? Social Bases of Resistance.” New Left Review 85, 7–16. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defence of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

Index

A Achebe, Chinua, 3, 8, 12, 14, 17, 28, 32, 183, 191, 192, 196–199, 204, 207–210, 212–214, 237, 239–241 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, 3, 8, 12, 17, 28, 183, 191, 196, 219, 222, 226, 228, 235, 241–243, 265 Adorno, Theodor W., 97, 99, 130, 176, 180, 186, 198, 237–239, 243 Ahmad, Aijaz, 25, 33, 59, 79, 184, 238 Amin, Samir, 40, 43, 56, 74, 78, 238 Andrade, Susan, 70, 81, 183, 215–218, 227, 241, 242 Arendt, Hannah, 132, 216, 231–233, 242 Arrighi, Giovanni, 2, 13, 30, 31, 39, 61, 62, 64–66, 69, 79–81, 110, 143, 146, 177, 254, 265, 268

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 94, 105, 130, 132 Bello, Walden, 28, 33, 40, 47, 48, 74–77, 82

C Cabral, Amilcar, 261, 268 Cameroon, 117, 133 Chomsky, Noam, 44, 75, 177 Cold War, 15, 44, 64, 112, 115, 129, 141, 142, 144–147, 153, 165, 166, 169, 177 Congo, Democratic Republic of (DRC), 10, 19, 44, 58, 90, 161 Conrad, Joseph, 10, 11, 162, 179 Côte d’Ivoire, 3, 81, 89, 177

D Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 216, 217, 241 Davidson, Basil, 45, 59, 75, 79, 261, 262, 268, 269

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 R. Spencer, Dictators, Dictatorship and the African Novel, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66556-2

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INDEX

Davis, Mike, 39, 48, 55, 73, 76, 173, 174, 250 Debt, 15, 20, 29, 39, 40, 47–49, 54, 56, 63, 70, 73, 76, 106, 110, 114, 146, 175, 193, 194, 203, 249, 253, 254 Decolonisation, 1, 2, 14, 16, 24, 26, 40, 45, 50, 58, 64, 66, 68, 70, 142, 176, 213, 235, 256, 259, 261, 266, 267 Democracy, 14, 23, 29, 41, 42, 51–54, 56, 57, 60, 67, 68, 70, 73, 74, 77, 78, 94, 114–117, 119–121, 133, 143–145, 148, 169, 170, 175, 176, 188, 192, 195, 218, 221, 222, 227, 228, 233, 235, 252, 255, 256, 259, 261, 262, 265, 268, 269 Dictatorship and dictators, 4, 42, 90, 91, 151

E Eagleton, Terry, 105, 132, 186, 223, 237, 238, 242, 243, 267, 270

F Fanon, Frantz, 59, 68, 79, 127, 213, 214, 256–261 Farah, Nuruddin, 3, 91, 92, 126, 130, 135, 240 Fascism, 58 Ferguson, James, 16, 32, 51, 77, 250, 253, 267 Financialisation, 48, 62, 80, 110, 111 Foden, Giles, 10, 11, 31

G G˜ıchingiri Nd˜ıg˜ır˜ıg˜ı, 5, 30, 267, 270 Gikandi, Simon, 100, 121, 128, 131, 133, 135, 202, 208, 240

Gramsci, Antonio, 57, 58, 78, 216

H Habila, Helon, 235, 243 Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio, 145, 146, 148, 178, 238 Harrison, Graham, 16, 21, 22, 32, 76, 77, 79, 250, 267 Harvey, David, 1, 2, 30, 48, 68, 71, 76, 81, 268

I Imperialism, 3, 6, 8, 9, 15, 17, 19, 20, 25–27, 39, 42, 54, 57, 61, 69, 71, 119, 134, 135, 141, 143, 145–147, 178, 184–190, 196, 212, 237, 249, 258–260, 263 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 8, 15, 28, 39, 47–49, 51, 53–55, 69, 71, 77, 78, 109, 110, 112, 146, 167–169, 173, 194–196

J Jameson, Fredric, 17, 28, 31, 32, 64, 67–69, 72, 80–82, 109, 126, 135, 183–191, 217–219, 235–238, 241, 250, 251, 265, 268, 269

K Kenya, 91, 101, 109, 111, 112, 117, 120–122, 133, 173 Kourouma, Ahmadou, 1, 3, 6, 8, 12, 29, 30, 70, 89–92, 129, 141, 142, 144, 147, 148, 155, 158, 159, 162–164, 166, 177, 179, 180, 264

INDEX

L Lazarus, Neil, 6, 18, 24–26, 30, 32, 33, 42, 74, 79, 183–185, 187, 188, 190, 236–238, 256, 268

M Magical realism, 107, 108 Márquez, Gabriel García, 3, 89, 96, 97, 106, 107, 130, 132 Marx, Karl, 60, 161–163, 178, 179, 185, 250, 251, 267 Mbembe, Achille, 5–8, 30, 31, 226, 267 Meiksins Wood, Ellen, 53, 146, 177, 262, 269 Miliband, Ralph, 2, 30, 178 Moyn, Samuel, 265, 266, 269, 270

N National allegory, 28, 183–190, 217, 238 Neo-colonialism, 17, 69, 176, 193 Neoliberalism, 1, 2, 10, 14, 16, 26, 27, 29, 39–41, 62, 68, 71, 72, 78, 129, 130, 167, 243, 249, 250, 253, 255, 256, 264, 266 Neumann, Franz, 40, 41, 74 New International Economic Order (NIEO), 70, 71, 81, 82, 266 Nigeria, 4, 46, 47, 50, 73, 183, 184, 191–195, 197, 199, 200, 204, 206, 207, 209, 213–215, 217, 218, 220, 221, 227–229, 233–236, 238–241, 243, 252

O Orwell, George, 11, 12, 31

275

P Panitch, Leo and Gindin, Sam, 44, 45, 74, 75, 143, 177, 263, 269 Performance, 6, 7, 28, 31, 91, 92, 97–104, 107, 113, 118, 120, 121, 131, 144, 166, 171, 172, 174–176, 180, 201, 221 Piot, Charles, 144–148, 177 Postcolony, 5–8, 31, 111, 176, 224, 226, 265, 267 Prashad, Vijay, 15, 32, 47, 51, 71, 75, 76, 82, 110, 132, 253, 256, 257, 268

R Rancière, Jacques, 255, 266, 268, 270 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 3, 89, 94, 95, 130

S Said, Edward W., 5, 30, 97–100, 102, 130, 131, 174 Saul, John S., 1, 16, 29, 32, 37, 39, 56, 61, 64, 65, 72–74, 78–80, 265 Schmitt, Carl, 7, 40, 41, 74, 242, 254 State, the postcolonial, 24, 60, 70, 93, 100, 101, 103, 107, 109, 144–146, 160, 172, 173, 176, 221, 260 Stiglitz, Joseph, 48, 50, 75, 76 Streeck, Wolfgang, 67, 81 Structural adjustment, 2, 8, 19, 22, 29, 39, 49–51, 53–55, 59, 64, 71, 76, 109–114, 133, 148, 167, 168, 173, 175, 178, 179, 194, 195, 215, 238, 239, 241, 249–251, 255

276

INDEX

T Togo, 142, 145–148, 152, 156, 178, 252 W Wallerstein, Immanuel, 2, 30, 37, 38, 43, 64, 66, 67, 69, 73, 74, 81, 116, 133, 254, 265, 268

wa Thiong’o, Ng˜ ug˜ı, 3, 30, 31, 89, 129, 131–135, 180, 239 World Bank, 8, 19, 28, 39, 47–49, 51–55, 57, 77, 78, 110, 129, 130, 146, 173, 194, 234