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?