The Role Of The Writer In Troubled Times—Kole Omotoso

Coming as I do from a country without a state (Nigeria) and living in a state without a country (South Africa) I must have a unique luck for being in the mainland area of Chaoskan, the state and country of chaos players, awon arije nidi ‘daru: those veritable amaphithiphithi, inhabitants of isiphithiphithi.

“During the colonial period the people are called upon to fight against oppression; after national liberation they are called upon to fight against poverty, illiteracy and under-development.” (The Wretched of the Earth)

Between these two periods exists a period of transition, of transformation which was not supposed to have a time, term or physical space. But it is a period that has become the place of chaos, the land of permanent transitional justice and of transformational arrangements forever in limbo. This is the land of Chaoskan which is neither a country nor a state. It is a time and a place that is not wished for and if and when it exists must be wished away. It is a place where there are no government services such as education, health and police protection. It is a place of illiteracy, of disease, ignorance, superstition and poverty.

“In 1789, after the bourgeois revolution, the smallest French peasants benefited from the upheaval. But it is a commonplace to observe and to say that in the majority of cases, for ninety-five per cent of the population of under-developed countries, independence brings no immediate change. The enlightened observer takes note of the existence of a kind of masked discontent, like the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threatens to burst into flames again.”  (The Wretched of the Earth, p. 59).

It is in this land where justice has given way to legalese, where the culture of lying has morphed into multicultural explanations and self-deception has become a way of life, Chaoskan is the place where troubled times exist. This is where we must seek to discover the role of the writer.

“It is true that independence has brought moral compensation to colonized peoples, and has established their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society, or to build up and affirm values. The warming, light-giving centre where man and citizen develop and enrich their experience in wider and still wider fields does not yet exist. Set in a kind of irresolution, such men persuade themselves fairly easily that everything is going to be decided elsewhere, for everybody, at the same time. “ (The Wretched of the Earth, p. 64.)

One of the least acknowledged roles writers played within the Afrikaner community took place in the sixties, at the height of the material successes of apartheid. Hermann Gilomee retells a story from Die Burger of 1952 in which the Devil is out of his mind as to how to destroy the Afrikaners. He had put them under an alien rule, taken away their republics, dragged them into two world wars, and still they survive. “Only one thing remains”, he counsels himself, “I shall make them prosperous and see if they can survive that!” The 1960s was the commencement of that prosperity. It also saw the beginning of the Sixters, the group of writers who began to question Afrikaner power base. Perhaps the best known and the most venomous is Breyten Breytenbach. Before him there had been others such as Van Wyk Louw who, in his play Die pluimsaad waai ver a play about the Anglo-Boer War (with the supporting help of Blacks), makes an old woman hesitantly ask, right at the beginning of the play the question: wat is ‘n volk? (What is a nation?) This so annoyed Verwoerd that he turned literary critic and admonished poets and writers not to ask what a nation is but to celebrate the nation as the creator of its own glory and destiny. (The Afrikaners)

We should remember that a writer is to ask questions and raise doubts.

Another writer to annoy another apartheid ruler was Opperman who had written a long epic poem at the end of the 1948 elections that saw the victory of the Nationalist Party, a poem my Afrikans professor made me study when I was learning Afrikaans, a poem familiar to all students of Afrikaans literature Jounaal van Jorik (1949). Sometime before he became state president, Botha “urged him to sit himself down on a rock and write an ode to the Republic of South Africa, to which Opperman replied that in Afrikaans the only word that rhymed with rock (rots) was vomit (kots) (The Afrikaners, p.555).

Van Wyk Louw and Johannes Degenaar called for an open conversation (oop gesprek) which none of the apartheid leaders cared for. Breyten Breytenbach is considered the greatest Afrikaner poet alive and he hated apartheid. He felt that the Afrikaner was trapping himself in a labyrinth of laws. In a letter to Die Burger in June 1965 Breytenbach said: “If apartheid was representative of Afrikanerdom, if the two could not be divorced, I see no hope for the Afrikaner. If I could renounce my being an Afrikaner I would do it. I am ashamed of my people.”

Commenting further on Breytenbach, Hermann Gilomee says that in the years following Breytenbach’s settlement in Paris and marriage to his Vietnamese wife, “he wrote as if some ideological mafia had captured the Afrikaner soul and had dragged the Afrikaner headlong to disaster. The task of the creative writer was to save them from this elite by helping them to rediscover the humanity of earlier periods of their history and the inhumanity of the present system.”

When Breytenbach applied for a visa for his wife and himself to visit South Africa and receive a poetry prize he had won, the government refused. Vorster told Breytenbach’s publisher that he considered Breytenbach an enemy of the Afrikaner people and his poetry as ‘morally pernicious and politically repulsive. If he puts his foot in the country, I should tuck him away so deeply in the prison building that he would never get out.” (The Afrikaners, p. 556)

The rest is history. Breytenbach founded an organization Okhela with links to the ANC. He came to South Africa under disguise in 1975 and was arrested and sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was released in 1982. Breytenbach’s statement to the effect that “I am no longer one of us!” must resonate with all writers who work in troubled times.

Examples exist all over the world and in Africa of writers who have had to pay dearly, sometimes
with their lives, when they dared to set right the men and women who rule the temporal world, when they dare to condemn their own people for doing wrong. In Nigeria in particular, Christopher Okigbo took up arms when the pen had failed him and was killed in the war front in the Nigerian Civil War 1967 – 1970.

Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged along with eight others who thought that Sani Abacha could do better than steal all the money from the Nigerian government coffers.

Wole Soyinka was imprisoned and put in solitary detention for twenty-four months for advising the
Nigerian military not to go to war against the Igbos of Biafra. Outside of Africa, the list is as long as a circle around the earth. How does Chaoskan come into being? The most crucial reason for the existence of this peculiar
condition is the failure of decolonisation. Listen to the following:

“We, the people of South Africa, declare for all our country and the world to know: That South Africa
belongs to all who live in it, black and white, and that no government can justly claim authority
unless it is based on the will of the people:

That our people have been robbed of their birthright to land, liberty and peace by a form of
government founded on injustice and inequality;

That our country will never be prosperous or free until all our people live in brotherhood, enjoying equal rights and opportunities;

That only a democratic state, based on the will of the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief;

And therefore, we the people of South Africa, black and white, together equals, countrymen and brothers adopt this FREEDOM CHARTER. And we pledge ourselves to strive together, sparing nothing of our strength and courage, until the democratic changes here set out have been won.

The People Shall Govern!

All National Groups shall Have Equal Rights!

The People Shall Share in the Country’s Wealth!

The Land Shall Be shared Among Those Who Work It!

All Shall Be Equal Before The Law!

All Shall Enjoy Human Rights!

There Shall Be Work And Security!

The Doors Of Learning And Culture Shall Be Opened!

There Shall Be Houses, Security and Comfort!

There Shall Be Peace and Friendship!

We all know that none of these ten ‘freedom charter commandments’ have been fulfilled in the 15 or so years of the South African state (1994) or in the almost fifty years of the Nigerian country (1960), nor in the 200 years of the existence of the Haitian Republic (1804), the first black liberated nation on earth.

Why is this so? There was a time when I thought that there was something called “post-liberation stasis” comparable to ‘post-natal depression! But this is so inadequate an explanation for a period that lengthens and expands in time and space. This is what has led to the attention to Chaoskan. What comes through is the fact that this condition lacks both the physical infrastructure on which everyday economic life depends and it does not know anything about the necessary moral infrastructure that underpins human and humane existence. “. . . a nation, says Lerone Bennet Jr., is an amalgam of critical decisions made at crucial forks in the road. A nation is a choice. It chooses itself at fateful forks in the road by turning left or right, by giving up something or taking something – and in the giving up and the taking, in the deciding and in the not deciding, the nation becomes. And even afterwards, the people and the nation are defined by the fork, and the decision that was made there, as well as the decision that was not made engraves itself into things, into institutions, nerves, muscles, tendons, and the first decision requires a second decision and the second decision requires a third, and it goes on until one day the people wake up and discover that they are mad and corrupt and divided, and that they have built war and hate and blood into the very air they breathe.” EBONY magazine August 1970.

It is not easy to say which comes first – the physical infrastructure or the moral infrastructure. If we say it is the moral infrastructure then we can conclude that Christianity and Islam changed our traditional moral infrastructure. In the case of Christianity which underpins western capitalist economic system, we have been part and parcel of that creed, to a large and to a small extent since the arrival of the Europeans among us. In the struggle for our liberation we swore to destroy and from destruction build again. Much of our liberation theology/ideology was built on the basis of western European moral infrastructure. And herein lies the horror of our situation. We reject the physical infrastructure but we accept the moral infrastructure on which that physical infrastructure is erected.

Moreover, over the period of time that we had lived under colonisation, we ourselves had become something else, a consuming population of western production, potential customers to articles that would make us continue the colonial economic system of producing what we did not consume and consuming what we did not produce. But with globalisation, it has become even more complicated because we have become part of a global system of production and consumption, producing what some of us eventually consume (within a system of catch-up consumerism!) and consuming what our slave labour of a lot us produces.

From time to time attempts have been made to create a win-win situation in human economic interactive affairs. Early apostles and missionaries of Christian sects as well as some Asiatic religious practices have always provided their example to the rest of humanity. It is only in recent times that the line is being pushed to the effect that economic activities could be conducted on a win-win basis. Communism and welfarism had attempted to bridged the link between the religious sects and the economic activities we are speaking about. Members of these organisations and even the states would have all citizens within its borders share and share alike. Further down the road it became something like “to everyone according to his/her need and from everyone according to their ability”. In spite of this wishful thinking, the reality on the ground has always been that one gets what one can and the devil take the rest. What I am trying to say is that no group of people, no society, no country or state has ever developed without taking advantage of others through the use of superior weaponry or technology. People and their resources have never been exploited democratically. Nobody has ever been enslaved democratically, nor has anyone colonised and exploited places and peoples through the result of the ballot box. Yet, with the end of slave trade and slavery, Africans were freed and supposed to get along with it without any compensation whatever. At the end of colonialism and imperial rule the newly independent African countries were supposed to get along as best they can and develop! At the end of apartheid Africans were asked to get along now that they are free and not being exploited racially by people of European origin.

Imperial Japan colonised China and parts of Asia. When Japan began its modern development Japan aided and collaborated with many of its former colonies into the modern world of high technology industrial development especially in the areas of the motor industry and computers. Their method of targeted industries and dedicated finance as an alternative development option to that of the West which pushes the market determination all the time was responsible for creating the Asian Tigers. When Japan insisted on documenting this type of development option, the World Bank insisted that Japan would have to pay for the research and for the publication. The resulting publication is available for all to see. Still there is a grudging unwillingness to recommend this method to countries needing to develop. What the Asian Tigers did was to transfer Development Plans from dates to projects.

Nazi Germany exploited the wealth of the Jews as well as the resources of the countries which they occupied, for example France, to bribe the German population with a high standard of living while they were carrying out their atrocities. Gotz Aly has documented the high standard of living of the soldiers and civilians of the Nazi Volksstaat from 1933 to 1945 in his book HITLER’S BENEFICIARIES: Plunder, Racial War, and The Nazi Welfare State (2005). At the end of the war the Allies imposed a punitive compensation on the Germans for the Jews, for Israel and for the countries which Germany had occupied during the war.

These issues are not being raised here to prop up demands for reparation for Africa and Africans. As the late MKO Abiola used to say, such demands might keep Africa in the news, they would not yield Africa a penny. I raise these issues to make it clear to us that we have to exploit ourselves and our resources in order to develop ourselves, all of us, not just a tiny minority. Begging for aid, complaining of previous exploitation and generally kow-towing to anybody or any country, past or future colonisers (I am thinking here of Britain and France as well as China and Japan), will not help Africa.

Africa has the privilege of teaching the world how to develop democratically, the irony of being generally undemocratic and the misfortune of being continuously under-developed by its liberators.

How can a writer help us out of Chaoskan is the same question as what does a writer do in troubled times? It is important that a writer who really wants to do something in troubled times must, like Prophet Amos of the Bible, condemn his own people and label them oppressors because they have abandoned values that they all shared. This is not easy to do. As the young Kenyan writer Parselelo Kantai puts it: In a country whose national secrets were only whispered (even though they were public knowledge), the most dangerous characters were those who spoke those secrets out loud and who stated the obvious. So for a generation they had been feared and derided by successive regimes. Considered an act of madness, art was driven out of the national conversation. Those artists who escaped into exile stayed there. The others watched their careers break down in alcohol and penury at the old National Theatre bar.”

So failure and poverty become the lot of those writers who decide to do something about troubled times, who decide to speak truth to power as well as to powerlessness and shout out loud that the emperor is naked and completely deluded, those who hold up radio stations to prevent an election thief from crowing about his loot as Wole Soyinka did in 1965 after the elections in Western Nigeria. No wonder there are so many writers who trade in metaphors and similes and insist that art and politics have nothing in common!  The first way a writer reacts, especially in troubled times, is that the writer must come to the stage at which he can say with Breten Bretenbach that I AM NO LONGER ONE OF US.

A pre-condition for doing what Prophet Amos did was coming to the point where he was no longer singing from the same hymn sheet as his people, when his people had abandoned the values in which they brought up the writer and the prophet and the poet. I AM NO LONGER ONE OF US. This statement sounds even more final in Yoruba: Emi o ki i se arawa mo! From this point onwards whatever the writer does is validated by the efforts to restore to the people the values that they previously lived by and which current rulers have muddied and soiled for temporary consumables.

But this is only a beautiful expression of the usual writer’s fascination with ambiguity. Usually this position leads to exile and worthless aloneness. Many African writers, spurred on by this sentiment, have had to go into exile during the half a century of African political independence. Among them are Chinua Achebe of Nigeria, Ngugi wa Thiong’O of Kenya, Ayi Kwei Armah of Ghana, Chinharai Hove of Zimbabwe.

The second way and perhaps a better and highly recommended way is that indicated by the saying NOT WITH YOU, NOT WITHOUT YOU (NEC TECUM NEC SINE TE). With this concept change for the better is not only possible. It is also possible to work with even some of those who are prepared to change their ways for the better. There is a conscious possibility of hoping that there would be worthwhile change somewhere along the line. In this option the writer gives up on the brand but does not give up on the people. The people can always construct a new brand, a new institution for themselves to carry them forward into the future. Thus, the space located between NOT WITH YOU, NOT WITHOUT YOU is the place of creative opportunity and the face of reformation of ancient ideas and the rebirth of new capabilities. The writer is NOT WITH YOU when you mouth ethnic and tribal comradeship. The writer is NOT WITH YOU when you mouth racial comradeship. The writer is NOT WITH YOU when you mouth ideological comradeship. The writer is NOT WITH YOU when you mouth class comradeship. One ethnicity, one tribe does not exhaust the number of ethnicities of our country. One race does not exhaust the races of our country. One ideology does not exhaust the ideologies of our country. One class does not exhaust the classes of out country. But NOT WITHOUT YOU would the writer go forward into constitutional comradeship. This is because there is only one constitution in our country and it covers all. We have to be constitutional comrades to go forward into the future. If South Africa is to belong to all who live in it, constitutional comradeship is the only guarantee. We must all be constitutional comrades. And what is more, constitutional comrades uphold the rule of law.

-Professor Omotoso is an award-winning Nigerian novelist, playwright, critic and scholar, who lives in South Africa