Postcolonialities: A Troubled View from the South
A masters degree course presentation for the University of East Anglia’s School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, delivered March 15, 2023
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NOTE: I made the deliberate decision to insert my own narrative into my presentation as a response to the fact that there were no women and only one non-white person on this section’s required reading list. Space creation and reclamation is central to the work of decolonization, and to that end it felt important to claim space for myself within the realm of this section’s excerpts: not just as a woman, but as first-generation descendant of former colonial subjects of the British Empire. Injecting my own narrative into the larger question of the postcolonial self being discussed in these readings was also a way of illustrating the same statement I make close to the end of this presentation: that we all interface with this postcolonial reality, and we are all interfaces of it.
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In the first chapter of his book, “Decolonizing the Mind,” Ngugi wa Thiong’o describes an unusual school in modern day Malawi:
In Malawi, [President Kamuzu] Banda has erected his own monument by way of an institution, The Kamuzu Academy [sic], designed to aid the brightest pupils of Malawi in their mastery of English.
“It is a grammar school designed to produce boys and girls who will be sent to universities like Harvard, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh and be able to compete on equal terms with others elsewhere.
‘The President has instructed that Latin should occupy a central place in the curriculum. All teachers must have had at least some Latin in their academic background. Dr. Banda has often said that no one can fully master English without knowledge of languages such as Latin and French…’”
For good measure no Malawian is allowed to teach at the [A]cademy — none is good enough — and all the teaching staff has been recruited from Britain. A Malawian might lower the standards, or rather, the purity of the English language. Can you get a more telling example of hatred of what is national, and a servile worship of what is foreign even though dead?
[“Decolonizing the Mind,” p.19]
Incidentally — or, perhaps, not — I attended Kamuzu Academy from Forms 3 to 5, the equivalent to Years 9 through 11 in the UK. By the time I arrived there, Malawian teachers were permitted to teach; they were paid far less than the white teachers, however, and were consistently treated as their own separate, lower, caste within the ranks of the still-majority-white staff. I arrived at Kamuzu Academy too late to learn Latin and Ancient Greek — the second classical language Dr. Banda insisted must be taught there — as Latin education began in Form 1 and Ancient Greek education began in Form 2. Thus I was relegated to a class called Classical Studies, where we learned Greek and Roman culture and folklore, but in English. In addition to late school transfers, the class also included students who the administration had quietly determined had absolutely no hope of success at Latin and Greek; thus the class had the reputation among students as being a sort of remedial course — community college for KA students — and was never really seen as a serious class, instead being seen as mostly the home of confused returnees from abroad and regular attendees of detention hall, instructed by whichever pitiable teacher had pulled the instructional short straw that year.
The absurdity within the absurdity was that while there were these myriad status stratifications within the system of ancient languages education at Kamuzu Academy, there was a real and far more nefarious stratification that enveloped the entirety of the campus: no local languages were to be spoken outside of the hostels. If Chichewa — the most widely spoken national language in Malawi — was heard by either staff or prefects anywhere outside of our living quarters, we could be punished: fatigue for first time offences, detention for repeat offenders or more defiant first-time rule breakers. This hierarchy of language was absolute, and the result on the school culture is that we ourselves incorporated the rule and its implications for our speech into our social fabric. Chortling loudly in unison any time someone mispronounced a word, particularly if they mixed up their l’s and r’s; doing our class readings for history and English in exaggeratedly British or American accents, occasionally with a pointed nasal twang if the reader felt especially like ticking off the teacher while barely skirting under the wire for detention assignment. The masters of the Kamuzu Academy social order at the time, the Chimie Crew — short for chimidzi, Chichewa for “of the village” — eventually created a kind of Esperanto of Kamuzu Academy speech. Comprised of English, French, Latin and Chichewa, it became KA’s new official language: they had thus taken the idea of linguistically inferior Malawians and inverted it, turning what superficially appeared to be the butchering of several languages superior to ours into its own form of supremacy and social stratifying system. For a brief moment in our young academic lives, then, mere English was no longer King.
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Kamuzu Academy graduates live permanently in the interstitial space between Malawi and its former colonial administrator, the UK — Chichewa too paltry for Malawi, English too accented for Britain, and thus complete cultural citizenship constantly called into question for both. This strikes me as emblematic of the postcolonial condition: one of perpetual disorientation and alienation, both from the home culture one was born into today and the imperial culture that one’s country was supposedly a composite part of yesterday. Postcolonial literature probes that unmooring, exploring questions of power in particular to expose the destructive wake of empire by way of story and narrative. Professor Ato Quayson of Stanford University, in his article titled “What is Postcolonial Literature?” for The British Academy in January 2020, writes:
“A possible working definition for postcolonialism is that it involves a studied engagement with the experience of colonialism and its past and present effects, both at the local level of ex-colonial societies and at the level of more general global developments thought to be the after-effects of empire…The term is as much about conditions under imperialism and colonialism proper, as about conditions coming after the historical end of colonialism.”
[“What is Postcolonial Literature?” The British Academy, January 2 2020 https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/blog/what-is-postcolonial-literature/ ]
If colonialism was a system of organizing the world, then the term postcolonial implies not just that system’s breakdown — by way of the political and economic unlashing from the former colonial masters — but the ongoing work of navigating a world defined by that specific system’s dissolution. And what we observe across this section’s readings is dissolution and disorientation in different forms — a child navigating complex cultural, linguistic and political realities in post-independence Kenya; a brother reflecting on the complexity of the emotional landscape of his adopted brother in Argentina; a woman embarking on an extramarital affair in the apex years of Apartheid South Africa; a windblown white traveler in eastern Africa. In all of these excerpts the protagonist is standing on the precipice of a world in breakdown, whether from the perspective of a breakdown that has already happened — such as with Julián Fuks’s story of his adopted brother — or from the perspective of a breakdown that is about to happen, such as with Binyavanga Wainanina’s child-self, observing first the simmering and then the eruption of conflict between Kenyans and Ugandans in his neighborhood. In all of the pieces, the protagonists seem to be at work at two projects simultaneously: making a home in the chaos despite their limited anchoring to any single cultural paradigm, and mapping their ways out of it, seeking out the possibility of transcending the mess. Both projects, however, require the protagonists to be problematically selective about the elements of their surrounding realities that they admit into their consciousness; ultimately it is the very act of reality selectivity that ensures that neither endeavor will find success.
Between these excerpts the key differentiator between them is power: who has it, how it is used, how it is deployed for the protagonists’ ends. Damon Galgut’s novella, “The Lover,” illustrates with compelling intricacy the mercurial nature of these power relationships, demonstrating through narrative the consequential gaps between who believes they have power and who actually holds the cards, on landscapes both geographical and cultural. The protagonist — different to the narrator — is a white man of European extraction, to whom we are introduced with this opening paragraph to the piece:
“A few years later he is wandering in Zimbabwe. No particular reason or intention has brought him here. He decides on impulse one morning to leave, he buys a ticket in the afternoon, he gets on a bus that night. He has it in mind to travel for two weeks and then go back.” [p.1]
Several things stand out from this opening paragraph, communicating critical information without directly laying it out. That he is young — or progressive — enough to refer to Zimbabwe as Zimbabwe and not Southern Rhodesia, the country’s colonial name until 1980. That he lives in a body and a life for which freedom of movement is assumed: he can leave wherever he is on an impulse, with no concrete plans for where he is going next and no consideration for possible borders where he could encounter difficulty of access. For him, no such difficulty exists, not in his mind and not yet in his lived experience. All of those things comprise power: the power to stay, the power to leave, the power inherent in conceding to a modern world order, leaving old names, and structures, behind.
Yet what we see in this piece is that despite Rhodesia now being Zimbabwe, the white Europeans the story’s protagonist subsequently encounters cannot help but behave in white Rhodesian ways. It is, for them, as though Black Africans exist only as set pieces in their imagined African adventures, hurdles to be leapt over or perhaps even destroyed, but never full humans who are agents in their own lives and those they intersect with — from the border officials who the travelers can’t believe will not permit their border crossings without visas, to the old Malawian man whom the Irishwoman yells at for not folding her clothes after washing them. Even the protagonist, as progressive as he considers himself to be, simmering in thinly veiled condescension at the listless boredom of his fellow travelers, standing up for the boatsman whose flipper was lost and, later, for the man who the Irishwoman had scolded: despite his consideration of himself as being an outsider to this system, he is still actively participating in it, and thus remains implicated in it. In his most emotional moments, he knows this, but isn’t able to truly extricate himself from the paradigm, instead marinating in the feeling, its own form of the same self-indulgence that brought him to Cape Maclear in the first place:
“…his anger is not just at her or even at the others in their party, the hottest part of it is for himself. He is as guilty as any of them, he too is passing through, he too has luck and money, all his self-righteousness will not absolve him.” [p.13].
Disorientation is the absolute rule of this story, and in this way this piece embodies, through the unique intersections of power and identity that open up over the course of the narrative, the power of postcolonial narratives to illustrate the ways in which even the prefix “post-” is suspect. The colonial is ever present, because the global reach of empire was so complete that the present must necessarily see and experience the weight of that history in all of its current iterations. Thus Galgut’s protagonist is able to move mostly seamlessly from Zimbabwe to Zambia to Malawi to Tanzania, then onto Europe, negotiating the few obstacles he does encounter with the world’s global reserve currency that is the United States dollar, because he moves in a body historically and thus still currently empowered by empire. Whereas the old Malawian man, the taxi drivers, the Lake Malawi boatsman and even the border officials remain at the receiving end of empire’s whims: even when they are able to briefly exert power, as with the border officials especially, that power quickly crumbles when faced with the superseding power of the white man’s money. The cruelly pathetic amount requested for the privilege of circumventing the rules — forty dollars — underscores by inversion just how little power the person at the receiving end of that interaction actually ever had: yet the fact of the negotiation makes the ongoing contextual complexity apparent, and it is this that remains fascinating in the postcolonial narrative space.
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In Binyavanga Wainaina’s “One Day I Will Write About This Place,” the figure of President Idi Amin in neighboring Uganda is a looming shadow over the daily lives of Wainaina’s family and community. Amin infamously named himself, among many things, the King of Scotland; as absurd as that may have sounded, I wonder if it was any more absurd than my mother being told, in her childhood in what was then Nyasaland in the late 1950s, that her Queen was a woman named Elizabeth in a place called England — or, rather, “Ingalande,” as it is still pronounced in the Chichewa cognate of the word — and that, after God, my mother’s personal allegiance was to be given to this outsider, for reasons she was never permitted to question. Amin’s inclusion in the narrative, despite his sporadic appearances, is critical for illustrating just how wide-reaching such entanglements of the global postcolonial order are.
Just as the social structures of my time at Kamuzu Academy — a post-colonial educational experiment that Queen Elizabeth’s daughter, Princess Anne, admiringly appointed “The Eton of Africa” on her 1989 visit to the campus — were filtered through the linguistic creole invented by the rules of that period’s social pyramid, navigating postcolonial spaces requires a similar ability to accept, then reinterpret the realities all agents in that system are navigating. To perceive boundaries as fluid and necessarily shaped by power; to recognize that power, in whatever forms it takes, must always be negotiated, and that there is no such thing as being external to the legacy of colonial empire. We all interface with this reality, and we are all interfaces of this reality. And the possibilities of this system’s deconstruction lie not in refusing to recognize it, but in plain observation of its manifestations, incrementally eroding its power by insisting on speaking truth to the silent violence of its ongoing presence.
