The Bleeding of the Stone

I am fascinated by the natural and spiritual world of this novel by Ibrahim Al-Koni, and how that world is changing with contact with Europe, America, and modernization. I include images, of the Libyan desert and mountains of the Bedouins, and of the famous rock carvings described in the text. Howard Banwell has an interesting collection of pictures of Libyan desert petroglyphs, a UNESCO world heritage site.

The interaction in the novel between Islam and Sufism and traditional African beliefs, practices, and religion is interesting.

"He'd become wary of hunting the waddan, and would never venture to the majestic heights until he'd recited all the Quranic verses he'd memorized, repeated, in Hausa, all the spells of the African magicians, then hung around his neck all the snakeskin amulets he'd bought from soothsayers traveling in caravans." (23-4)

Waiting for an Angel

Helon Habila's rich novel takes place during the rule of Sani Abacha (left), president of Nigeria from 1993-98 who closed down the media, attempted to control dissent and committed human rights abuses, such as the hanging of non-violent democracy and environmental advocate Ken Saro-Wiwa. In class we discussed the narration of the novel, how it begins near the end with Lumba, the protagonist, in prison, and how it uses a variety of voices and perspectives. In this way Habila infuses the text with the nightmarish quality of life in Nigeria under Abacha, and captures a communal perspective.

Lurking behind the story of Nigeria in the 1990s is the scramble for African oil, the corruption and violence that attend it.

Ancestor Stones

Ancestor Stones (2006) is a rich and beautiful novel capturing the experience of women and families during the last 80 years in Sierra Leone. The first time I read the novel was preparing to teach it this summer. The NPR website provides an interesting history of Aminata Forna, whose father was hung during the Civil War when she was only eleven years old.

Reading the novel in the context of the on-going scramble for Africa I am struck by the thematic connections between the lives of the characters in the novel and many fundamental issues relevant across Africa. My students are engaging topic found in the novel including the loss of African religion, rise of Islam in West Africa and colonial resistance, medical care in Africa, African soldiers in WWII, female genital mutilation, gold mining in Africa, diamonds in Africa, role of traditional chiefs under colonialism during neo-colonial period, strikes against colonial rule, sterilizing of women in Africa, African students in England and France, voter fraud in Africa, and war in Africa.

One theme that branches from the text is that of conflict or "Blood Diamonds," a topic brought to widespread consciousness by the Hollywood film. Behind the deeply disturbing story of blood diamonds in another African story -- the DeBeers diamond monopoly. (See my post below on Cecil Rhodes.) You see the surprising thing is that diamonds are not even rare! They are, in fact, a common stone. It is just that the DeBeers company in South Africa has bought them up, created a monopoly, and jacked up the price for their pure profit. Here is an interesting video.

Congo and "Independence"

Reading King Leopold's Ghost developed my interest in the Congo so I did some research to try to bring my understanding closer to the present.

I watched the film Lumumba (dir. Raoul Peck) about the man who led the Congolese independence movement and became the country's first Prime Minister. The article on Lumumba at Wikipedia and the short film about Lumumba on YouTube are good to watch or read before viewing the film, as the film is more about the man than the whole historical context. Any reader of King Leopold's Ghost will find these sites interesting.

Here is a passage from the speech Lumumba gave on the day that the independence of the Congo was declared:

We have seen our lands seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is right.

We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and for a black, accommodating for the first, cruel and inhuman for the other...

We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the blacks, that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that a black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins.

Who will ever forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown?

All that, my brothers, we have endured.

But we, whom the vote of your elected representatives have given the right to direct our dear country, we who have suffered in our body and in our heart from colonial oppression, we tell you very loud, all that is henceforth ended.

Imagine how after hundreds of years of slavery and European domination that speech and that moment of independence must have felt to the people of the Congo!

Lumumba was clearly an inspiring and upstanding leader, but the Belgians and the Americans plotted against him. The YouTube clip CIA Congo 1960 gives a good background.

To the great shame of our country, the American government helped install the tyrant who devastated the Congo from 1965 to 1997, Mobutu Sese Seko. During this time he became one of the richest men in the world, worth over 5 billion -- one of the most corrupt leaders in human history. He also ruled in an unbelievably harsh way -- and millions died. Can you believe that will all of that, Mobutu was a friend of Nixon, Reagan and George HW Bush? He contributed to their election campaigns and they supported him! Learn more about Mobutu at Wikipedia.

Shockingly, the trauma of the Congo does not stop under Leopold; it comes right up to Reagan and Bush, and to our day.

Racism in Heart of Darkness

"I am talking about a book which parades in the most vulgar fashion prejudices and insults from which a section of mankind has suffered untold agonies and atrocities in the past and continues to do so in many ways and many places today. I am talking about a story in which the very humanity of black people is called into question."

So speaks Chinua Achebe about Heart of Darkness. Achebe makes disturbing points about Conrad's personal attitudes calling him "talented and tormented," hinting at the issue of Conrad's repressed sexual orientation -- a matter that haunts, I think, nearly all Conrad's writing.

Yet the force of Achebe's critique is an analysis of the text, an analysis which might be seen as one of the springs of Achebe's own writing. To my mind the most powerful statement in the essay is

Which only leads one to surmise that Western psychoanalyist must regard the kind of racism displayed by Conrad as absolutely normal despite the profoundly important work done by Frantz Fanon in the psychiatric hospitals of French Algeria.

What do we learn from this? What is the place of Heart of Darkness, this most revered of novels? Of European/American writing about Africa? What about Conrad's critique of Belgian colonialism? When is it time to turn to African writers themselves?

The Dark Places of the Earth

"And this also," said Marlow suddenly, "has been one of the dark places of the earth."

So here, too, SW Michigan, and the Pottawatomie removal, what they call the "Trail of Death."

The "removal" took place in 1838. There is a remarkable journal of the escorting military officer. What does his journal have in common with the voices we hear in Heart of Darkness? Here is one entry:

Monday 1st Oct. Early in the morning we left Island Grove - traveled over a dry prairie country, 17 miles, we reached our encampment near Jacksonville at 3 o’clock in the afternoon. Nothing occurred during our march except a child fell from a wagon and was much crushed by the wheels running over it. It is thought the child will die. Tonight some of the chiefs reported 2 runaways who left this morning. During the evening we were much perplexed by the curiosity of visitors, to many of who the sight of an emigration or body of Indians is as great a rarity as a traveling caravan of wild animals. Late at night the camp was complimented by serenade from Jacksonville Band.

Richard Taylor has created a website with the history of the Pottawatomie removal from SW Michigan and Northern Indiana.
Does Kurtz' judgment fall here as well?

I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror--of an intense and hopeless despair.

What horrors form the basis, are fulfilled now daily in the continuation, of your and my 'civilization'?

"I myself never made any lethal injections."

King Leopold's Ghost is a narrative of horror and genocide (1) not so far from us in time. My grandfather (below) was a grown man at the time the holocaust in the Congo occurred.




There are many events described in King Leopold's Ghost that I can't simply get out of my head. Hochschild talks about how people who knew what was happening tried to psychologically distance themselves, to excuse themselves of responsibility. In this context he talks about Dr. Johann Kremer, a physician at Auschwitz, who justified himself watching orderlies make lethal injections into people he selected -- "I myself never made any lethal injections." (p.122)

The Europeans forced Africans to capture the slaves, lead the chain gangs, order the troops, do the whipping and killing that they, the Europeans, demanded. Of course, as with Dr. Kremer, this does not remove their responsibility. It makes them more guilty for involving others in their crime.


There were Europeans and Americans who acted on what they saw. George Washington Williams, H.D. Morel, Roger Casement, and William Sheppard emerge from this book as true heroes. But, there were far too few heroes, and far too many who simply went along.

What of those who lived during the time, such as my grandfather, but never bothered to look into what was going on? What of them?

And, in 2008, what of us?

(1) I use that word "genocide" even though Hochschild refuses it (p.225). As far as the Europeans were concerned the Africans were an "ethnic group" and their program of slavery and robbery amounted to a campaign to annihilate them. Indeed, Hochschild says that the population was "reduced" by 50%.

Cecil Rhodes

No one in class signed up to write about Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), so I thought I could pitch in. One of the richest men in the world, Rhodes was a huge figure in the British colonial domination of Africa, as this image suggests. The image is a political cartoon created when Rhodes announced plans to put a telegraph between South Africa and Egypt -- both British colonies. Rhodes also tirelessly advocated for an enormous "Cape to Cairo" railroad, that would link the British colonies up and down the east side of Africa.

Born in England, Rhodes managed to obtain almost a complete monopoly of the diamonds in South Africa -- far and away the world's most important source of diamonds. He started the De Beers Diamond Company, the powerful international diamond monopoly depicted in the recent movie "Blood Diamond."

A governor in the Cape Colony of South African, Rhodes helped instigate the Boer War (see Peter's blog). He tricked, cheated, and threatened various African people out of their land to eventually control the area that became the country Rhodesia, named after Rhodes himself. (Now called Zimbabwe.)

Rhodes was a complete racist. He believed that the "British race" was destined to rule all others and for that reason he was a huge advocate of the British empire, wanted even to put America back under British rule. He created a secret club and a world famous scholarship program to bring promising young men from the colonies to England where they could be trained as leaders of the British empire. These Rhodes Scholarships continue today -- one of those who received this award and studied at Oxford was Bill Clinton, later to be the US president.

Here is a famous quote from Cecil Rhodes,

We must find new lands from which we can easily obtain raw materials and at the same time exploit the cheap slave labor that is available from the natives of the colonies. The colonies would also provide a dumping ground for the surplus goods produced in our factories.

Village in Transformation

The images used in the virtual world, the Village of Umuofia, come with permission from the Jones Photographic Archive of photographs of Southeastern Nigerian art and culture. Jones was a District Officer in Nigeria from 1926 to 1946, and in 1950 he wrote The Ibo and Ibibio Speaking Peoples of S.E. Nigeria. (I wonder how the book might compare to that not so mythical book The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.)

His photographs were taken perhaps a generation after the events narrated in Things Fall Apart, and many practices including dress, housing, religion, still were similar to the precolonial period. As you can see from studying the archive, and like many Western anthropologists of the period, Jones sought out and photographed "traditional" culture and artifacts. For that reason the picture (above) of a mixed collection of village houses, some traditional and some, clearly Western, especially interests me.

In this picture we can clearly see at least three kinds of structures -- I imagine they are houses -- one a traditional round hut, another with a tile or perhaps tin roof, and a third type, on the right, that is more Western, with square walls, hinged doors and windows. The boys seem to have Western style clothes. This blending of tradition and new was something that I saw in almost all of the villages I visited in Senegal in 2003.

Joyful Social Life in Things Fall Apart

This time rereading Things Fall Apart I am struck by the many subtle portrayals of a joyful social life of the Ibo. I wonder what scenes in the novel strike you in this way. Early on Unoka, Okonkwo's father, remembers the cool evenings of the harmattan and the arrival of kites -- the soaring raptor pictured here,

Old men and children would then sit round log fires, warming their bodies. Unoka loved it all, and he loved the first kites that returned with the dry season, and the children who sang songs of welcome to them.

Or preparing for the New Yam Festival,

Okonkwo's wives had scrubbed the walls and the huts with red earth until they reflected light. They had then drawn patterns on them in white, yellow and dark green. They then set about painting themselves with cam wood and drawing beautiful black patterns on their stomachs and backs. The children were also decorated...

(By the way, apparently the New Yam Festival is still an important Igbo celebration.) One of the joys of this novel is the way it celebrates Igbo life -- and that stands in a contrast to problems in the society, and to the changes that are to come. I think Achebe wants us to see the beauty in the Igbo way of life, and to see how tragic it is that it falls, or, perhaps more accurately, is torn, apart.

Naka nga def ? Maa ngi fii rekk.

As we explore Africa before colonialism one of the first observations must be about the enormous diversity of environments, life ways, ethnic groups, and languages that existed.

When I was in Senegal with a group of teachers I began a study of the Wolof language, spoken by the largest ethnic group in that country. Wolof is a branch of the Niger-Congo language family and the map shows the country of Senegal and the distribution of Wolof speakers.

According to Wikipedia the Wolof Empire was a medieval West African state from 1350 to 1890. Women played an important role in politics and society was divided into a variety of classes including blacksmiths, tailors, musicians, and griots. Leaders of the society were nominally muslim, but Islam didn't become the part of everyday life until the 19th century. There were various substates, ruled by families, classes of nobles, and warriors. The arrival of the Portugese led the rulers to move their capital to the coast, and the wealth produced by the Atlantic trade divided the kingdom, led to corruption and destruction, and control by the French, a pattern repeated across Africa.

The Wolof are a most hospitable people who will never eat in front of you without inviting you to share their food from a common bowl. (In fact the English words "banana" and "yam" come from Wolof.) Rituals of greeting, shaking hands, and politeness are important. Naka nga def ? How are you? Maa ngi fii rekk. I am fine. Jërëjëf - Thank you. Like the Ibo they break kola nuts at times of ceremony, and as with many West Africans there is a great love of drumming and music -- Youssou N'Dour, perhaps the most famous musician in the world, is Wolof. While in Senegal I participated in many spontaneous drumming and dancing events in the community near my residence.

Language in Senegal is highly political -- which languages are used and privileged by the state empowers some groups over others. Thus while Wolof is the most commonly spoken language, other language speakers resist Wolof as a national language. There are at least 36 indigenous languages in Senegal, in addition to Wolof some of the most important are Serer, Pulaar, Mandinka, and Jola. As a legacy of colonialism, schooling, public administration and communication are in French. While we struggle in America over the role of Spanish, imagine, if you can, the challenges for education, government, business in Senegal!

Welcome to African Scramble

This academic blog accompanies African Literature (English 3140) at Western Michigan University in Fall 2008 and serves as a resource and a gateway to the interconnected blogs and resources developed by students in the course.

Drawing on an understanding of the European "Scramble for Africa" of the 19th and 20th centuries we will examine the current scramble for African resources and labor that appear to be defining Africa of the 21st century -- a scramble that is truly global involving the United States, China, as well as Europe and many others. While our focus will be on literature we will also consider essays, historical analysis, film, speakers, library and internet resources.

The map above shows European colonies in Africa as of 1914 and raises a number of questions. How did the Africa land mass come to be controlled by Europe? What effects did European colonialism have on Africa? How did modern Africa nations develop? What is happening to the people and resources of Africa today?