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Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
WRITING THE MOTHERLAND FROM THE DIASPORA:
ENGAGING AFRICA IN SELECTED PROSE TEXTS OF
DAMBUDZO MARECHERA AND BUCHI EMECHETA
Ayo Kehinde, Ph.D
University of Ibadan, Nigeria
1. Introduction
Africa has been variously read by both Africans at home and those in the Diaspora, all
too often as a continent wallowing in neocolonial decadence; hence the popular tag ‘Afro-
pessimism’. Actually, African literature, in general, and the novel, in particular, has always
been a site for the contest of text and context. It is always handcuffed to history, unlike many
other regional novels which have become insular and autolectic. This observation has
influenced the assertion of Aijaz Ahmad (1992) that each third-world literature is a socially
symbolic act, a national allegory.
Over the past two decades or so, African literature in Europe has made a strong
impact on world literatures and cultures. The myriad of Prizes that have been won by the
African writers in Europe and the growing interest in the reception of their works demonstrate
the validity of this claim. Diasporic African fictions (most especially the Europe-based ones)
have taken three principal directions in recent times. One, there is the influence of the
visionary style and picaresque narrative of Latin American magical realists. Such works now
take African fiction into the once uncharted territory. The second variety of African fictions in
exile comprises those that are preoccupied with social and political themes of a kind well
established in African writings. The third category of African fictions in the Diaspora initiates a
new wave of critical thinking; the writers in this camp view their works as an unproblematic
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
synthesis of the Western and the African modes of fiction writing. This blend of autochthonous
and imported cultures allows the writers to patronize many of the conventions of ‘-isms’ –
postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, cross-culturalism and
feminism. It also lures the writers to write in a highly complex style that looks both outward to
the rest of the world and inward. The threshold of Diaspora is revealed as a zone of
trepidation, whereby the subject (the writer) faces two places at the same time (Arjun
Appadurai, 2001). On the one hand is the memory of home, and on the other, the agonies of
desolation. He thus experiences a form of hyphenated or dual identity.
The African writers of fiction in the Diaspora bring the horrors of their motherland to the
fore in their literary explorations. In order to address the decadence of the neocolonial Africa
and to reconstruct its painful realities, writing becomes an elemental tool for survival for most
of the African writers in Europe. By choosing a permanent home in exile, they occupy an
unstable and complicated position toward Africa, the memory of which, although inextricably
linked to the postcolonial disillusionment, remains a presence in their lives, shaping their
outlook and surfacing always in their works. Hence, Africa becomes, like Salman Rushdie’s
India, a symbol of some sense of loss, relentlessly driving various African writers living abroad
“to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt” (Rushdie,
1991:10). However, the decision to leave Africa, emanating mostly from a choice to relinquish
physically the ordeals of struggling through the excruciating pains of neocolonial misrule,
lends these writers the geographical and temporal distance necessary for an adequate
assessment of personal and communal implications of the neocolonial decadence. Africa, and
specifically the neocolonial betrayal of the emancipatory promises of independence, becomes
a recurring theme directly or indirectly dominating the works of these writers who have been
driven into exile by agonies of postcolonial disillusionment.
One other preliminary remark which should be made about the current trend of African
fictions in exile is that there is just a little element of emotional sense of homecoming in them.
This is informed by the impetus that drove some of the writers into exile. It is saying the
obvious that Africans are leaving their motherland, on daily basis, in great number. This
phenomenon has led to the creation of a variety of new African diasporic communities,
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
different from the traditional conceptions of ‘the African diaspora’. The motivation for their
leaving ranges from voluntary migration to forced displacement. Actually, why some African
writers have been propelled to go into exile cannot be divorced from the general socio-
political climate of their individual nations; that is, their individual nation’s idiosyncratic
‘troubles’ and the shared experiences of the nations in general. Many African writers have
been forced into exile by need; others motivated by ambition, yet some others were driven
away by persecution. One major side effect of this depressing scenario is the painful
departure of both renowned as well as the little-known African writers from their primary
source –their continent. They flee their home countries in search of greater educational
opportunities, better economic conditions, political freedom and other opportunities.
The African fiction writers in Europe are considered in this paper as belonging to the
emerging New African Diasporas. Isidore Okpewho (2002) describes this relatively fresh
development as the “New African Diasporas” distinguishable from the traditional Diasporas,
who were dispersed from their homeland by a traumatic, even catastrophic use of coercion or
violence. To a great extent, there exist some divergences and convergences in the features
and experiences of traditional African Diasporas and the new African Diasporas. The
circumstances under which the ‘New African Diasporas’ set sail from their homelands and
their general sense of belonging, especially since they still have social and cultural roots back
in their original homelands (Okpewho, et al, 2001) distinguish them from the proto-African
Diasporas who are mostly either excluded from full integration into the dominant host society
or do not intentionally wish to be integrated because the cost in terms of dignity and identity
may be too high.
In this paper, the (re)presentation of the image of Africa and Africans in one variety of
many African diasporic writings is examined. In the main, the focus of the discourse is on
fictions on Africa, which take place in Europe and centre on African identities and neocolonial
decadence. The central thesis of the paper is that exile, as figured in the selected novels,
does not portray a typical retreat from reality. The abandonment of the homeland is not a way
to escape the boarders of a suffocating milieu, a continent being ravaged by a bewildering
amalgam of problems and social ills –poverty, wars, diseases, misgovernance, corruption,
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
nepotism, ethnic rivalries and unemployment. Actually, one common motif found in African
fictions in Europe is the idea of memory; there is a renewed interest in a broad variety of
socio-cultural discourses. Another theoretical underpinning of this paper is that fiction is a
veritable weapon for the formulation of cultural, political and social identities. African fictions
of exile (in Europe) are held in this paper to have the capacity to capture an image of Africa
beyond cultural-nationalist stereotypes. They provide an alternative vision of the Negritudinal
sentimental temper whereby Africa is construed as a ‘beautiful mother’; what we have in most
of the fictions of Africans in Europe is a counter-discourse to the hitherto popular sentimental
portrait of Africa. The pervading images that populate the works include disillusionment,
planlessness, misgovernance, heartlessness, tension, inequalities, and injustice; in fact, all
forms of dissonance and pain are elaborated in most of the works of African writers in Europe.
Their works constitute a virtuoso performance of double consciousness, more directly
influenced by Paul Gilroy’s articulation of the dilemma of striving to be both Europeans and
black than by the regionally specific context of W.E.B. Dubois’s theory about the
internal/external hybridity experienced by African Americans in the United States. The African
writers in Europe react constantly to their condition of displacement and loss in their works;
they are always trying to negotiate the gulf separating the homeland from an exile location.
African fictions in Europe provide a quintessential paradigm of articulating the transformation
of exile and migration (Wumi Raji, 2003). The same blood flowing in the veins of African
people at home also flows in those of their counterparts staying in Europe.
Although the African writers of fiction in Europe have crossed boarders, their texts are
still expressions of the cultural, social, political, artistic, economic and religious experiences of
the globally dispersed populations of African ancestors. In line with Stuart Hall (1997) and Niyi
Osundare (2002), the African diaspora is hereby approached as a geographic, transnational,
cultural and ideological space. The African writers of fiction in Europe have always taken a
leap forward in the meshing of socio-political concerns with their works. This brings to mind
Adebayo Williams’ view that:
The crisis of governance and democratization in Africa has left a profound mark on its
literature…African writers have played a crucial role in the political evolution of the continent,
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
particularly in influencing the turbulent trajectory of the post-colonial state in Africa
(1996:349).
Really, African writers in Europe, despite their physical separation from their
fatherland, still attach great importance to Africa, a continent which deserves to be better
understood and appreciated. It is a fact that, sometimes, our national discourse as reflected in
the domestic media is often overheated, frequently sensational and occasionally overly
passionate. In the process, interested outsiders and discerning nationals are at a loss as to
the credibility and real direction of an African Renaissance. Therefore, African fiction writers in
Europe use their works as their contributions to an increased understanding of Africa. Their
specific mission is to capture the spirit of the continent, to reposition the continent in the
minds of Africans and the rest of the world. As a generation of African writers, they have
discovered their mission and fulfilled it. The African fiction writers in Europe considered in this
paper are the Nigerian-born Briton, Buchi Emecheta, and Dambudzo Marechera, the late
radical Zimbabwean writer who lived in London. Through an analysis of these writers’ fictional
works, the paper considers how Africa has been constructed in and by the works of fiction,
that is, how Africa has been used as a topos, a theme, a trope, how in short, it has been
metaphorized. The selected works reveal that in most African nations, self-determination
seems elusive, primarily because of social, political, economic and educational degeneration
under successive military and civilian regimes and administrations respectively.
One excruciating pain of African neocolonial decadence which is a motif in the fictions
of Africans in Europe is that, as a heritage in leadership, the continent has, as a bequest, men
and women with no vision of a better Africa, but an unwavering mission to enrich themselves
in the midst of their look-alike loafers as well as grinding poverty, not only of materials but
also of technological prowess. And, with hindsight, it is obvious that the problems associated
with self-determination will take a miracle for some of the nations to get back on the right but
ingenuous track of meaningful development, a track they veered away from since the early
1960s. Another unfortunate revelation of the trouble with Africa isolated in the selected
fictional works is that, certainly, the task of self-awareness and the unique empowerment of
the individual as well as the advancement of the continent are not going to be lived up to by
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
our present crops of bad managers, as opposed to genuine leaders that we lack in the
present dispensation. These African writers in Europe enjoy the advantages of a ‘foreign’
land, where there is freedom to write and time as well as space for this aspect of self-
realization and personal development. Not to commit the heinous fallacy of
overgeneralization, this claim applies only to those who can surmount the daily problems of
existence itself. In fact, not all African writers in the Diaspora succeed, but despite all odds,
one or two do triumph in their adoptive countries.
Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, aptly captures the benefit of being an African writer
in exile, most especially during the agonizing period of military rule in some African countries.
Playing on the term ‘brain drain’, Soyinka comments: “Lucky drainees! The brains of their
stay-at-home colleagues will be found as grisly sediments on the riverbed of the Nile. Or in
the stomach linings of African crocodiles and vultures” (1990:112). Therefore, physical
distance from home with its attendant experiences of sorrow, victimization, bitterness,
loneliness, dejection, depression and nostalgia (Tejumola Olaniyan, 2003) may be a painful
and very agonizing experience. However, staying at home, inundated with socio-political and
economic problems, may not be a better and safer alternative. A living exile is far luckier than
a dead stay-at–home. Those African writers in exile have always proved wrong the
hypothesis that the distance of exile kills artistic creativity. Nurudin Farah, a Somalian writer,
who has been in exile since the 1970s, also concurs with the opinion of Soyinka on the luck of
the African writers in exile. He believes that he could not have been a writer in Somalia, only a
prisoner. In his words, “distance distills; ideas become clearer and better worth pursuing”
(quoted from Tejumola Olaniyan, 2003:2). To a great extent, African writers do “more to
reveal the reality of postcolonial Africa than most African scholars” (Patric Chabal, 1992:8).
The African writers in exile prefer peace and their own peace of mind to any piece of land.
However, Edward Said (1991) asserts that the achievements of exile are permanently
undermined by the loss of something left behind forever. The African fiction writers in Europe,
in order to reconstitute this ‘loss’ referred to by Said and Rushdie, strive in their works to
reconstruct and deconstruct the African neocolonial betrayal by turning their scrutinizing gaze
upon it.
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
The question remains: how do Marechera and Emecheta engage the dilemma of their
individual motherland? The discussion that follows attempts an exploration of this question. In
the main, this paper confirms the veracity of the basic hypothesis of this discourse that,
although a marked divide separates African writers who remain in Africa at this period of
neocolonial disillusionment from those who have opted to escape the daily traumas by
becoming expatriates, emigrants, refugees and exiles, they still dwell on the same issue: the
critique of neocolonial rulers who have made the emancipatory promises of independence
impossible (Carol Fadda-Conrey, 2003). Their themes are bound by a single entity –Africa in
the throes of neocolonial decadence. I shall link the fictions of Africans in Europe to the social
conditions that inspire them, that is, their continual (and ardent) emphasis on the motherland.
2. Dambudzo Marechera: Venom on Postcolonial Decadence
We cannot gainsay the fact that a people’s literature evolves out of their individual and
communal experiences. This is, perhaps, why literature from Southern Africa is essentially a
literature of commitment. Marechera’s novels, for instance, are replete with violent scenes,
which signify the socio-political outlooks of his homeland. A study of his art, therefore, may
tend to be defective if an attempt is not made to locate his major thematic preoccupations
within the totality of the history of his society. Charles Dambudzo Marechera, a quintessential
subversive writer, was born in Vengere Township, Fusape, in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)
on June 4, 1952. He died in Harare on August 18, 1987. He grew up amid racial
discrimination, poverty and violence. He lived a life of protest –he was expelled from Mission
school (for challenging the colonialist teaching), from the University of Rhodesia (for
protesting racial discrimination), from Oxford (for allegedly attempting to burn down part of the
school), and he had a solo protest march against the government of Ian Smith in Rhodesia
and had to flee the nation.
During his lifetime, he used his creative enterprise and vigour to imaginatively chronicle
the state of affairs in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia), especially the war situation. Thus, his
works foreground a background of discontent and disillusionment with the past, present and
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
predictably the future situations in his continent. Mbulelo Mzamane (1983:203) comments on
the art of Marechera thus:
A new generation of writer among whom the most celebrated is probably Dambudzo
Marechera, author of the prize-winning “The House of Hunger” and “Black Sunlight” is less
preoccupied with early historical theme. They are more concerned with the contemporary
state of affairs, namely the recent war situation in Zimbabwe.
Marechera also had his own personal crisis that influenced what he wrote. For
instance, at the time of writing The House of Hunger, he was in a crisis having just been
expelled from the University of Oxford. He therefore became a “homeless wanderer” (Flora
Veit-Wild, 1992:176). His feeling of total loss and utter despair greatly informed the bitter
venom which he poured on African neocolonial leaders through his works of art. The title story
of the collection (“House of Hunger”) captures Marechera’s brutalized childhood and youth in
colonial Rhodesia. He vividly depicts the township squalor of growing up in a settler-exploited
Rhodesia. In fact, “House of Hunger” relies heavily on a carnivalesque ‘the world is upside
down’ approach and scatological imagery which foregrounds the woes of an underdeveloped
country. The following scene is an apt illustration of this claim:
There’s hungry people out there. There’s homeless people out there. There’s many going about in
the rags of their birthday suits. And they’re all mad. They’s all got designs… There’s clouds of flies
everywhere you go. There’s armies of worms glittering in our history. And there’s squadrons of
mosquitoes homing down the cradle of our future (59-60).
The significance of Marechera’s contribution to the fictional discourse of the issues of
war and corruption in African continent is that he carved out a niche for himself through a
special treatment of such seemingly obsolete theme. What is foregrounded in Marechera’s
fiction, what stands out in sharp relief against the determinate temporal-spatial setting, are the
existential realities of birth and death, pleasure and pain, power and victimization – that is, the
realities of human experience. These problems are treated in a generalized, abstracted
manner, as constant, trans-historical and ubiquitous continuities in human existence.
Afroeuropa 3, 1 (2009) AFROEUROPA Copyright © 2008 All rights reserved. REVISTA DE ESTUDIOS AFROEUROPEOS JOURNAL OF AFROEUROPEAN STUDIES REVUE DES ÉTUDES AFROEUROPÉENNES ISSN: 1887-3456.
Therefore, with particular reference to The House of Hunger and Black Sunlight, Marechera
exhibits a passionate concern for human issues which underline the various betrayals of trust,
love, duty and conscience and the inhuman treatment that is often the lot of the many
underprivileged members of the society. He is primarily concerned with man as a victim of
history within the framework of the socio-political structures that oppresses him. A blurb writer
in The House of Hunger captures the preponderance of social realities in Marechera’s fiction
thus: “I don’t know another book about Africa that deals with the whole situation at such a
level, except perhaps Lessing or Head.”
Actually, The House of Hunger captures, as much as possible, the typical African life,
so that the various problems facing the entire Africans, in particular, and the black race, in
general, are made known, even to the ignorant ones, for them to see the need for a better
tomorrow. The peculiar tone of the work may be traced to a certain traumatic influence of his
social background. His life and literary vocation manifest in the context of neocolonial
decadence. This is in support of the assertion of Mark Afadama (1988) that Marechera’s
“imagination, the depth and variety of which are well externalized through his works,
bespeaks a conditioning by experiences acquired in the contemporary South Africa” (27). The
artistic expressions of Marechera are pivoted on two basic concerns: first, on a commitment
to “exploring intensely and ultimately the well–springs of our (African) modern experience in
all its range and complexity” (Abiola Irele, 1981:9); and second, on a quest for and an
accentuation of intrinsic value -properties of literary art.
Although Marechera was in Oxford when he wrote his works, he still dwelt perceptively
on the ‘trouble’ in his motherland. The House of Hunger, for instance, deals with social issues
in Africa, such as oppression, alienation, power lust, its source, social marginalization and
betrayal of trust. All these issues are effectively blended into the story of an individual
consciousness developing in a society, which, in its turn, is battling against many odds. The
anonymous protagonist of the story grows through experience, which can be rightly described
as a “rite of passage”. By so doing, Marechera creates an intense degree of alienation – so
severe that the protagonist occasionally suffers mental disturbances which often develop to
full-scale mental derangement. The traumas of the protagonist’s personal domestic history
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juxtapose with his experiences of the dehumanizing agonies of Zimbabwe (nay Africa) to
make him a neurotic person.
Marechera’s nihilism about the conditions of his society, in particular, and Africa, in
general, is not significantly different from those of other African writers who are at drastic odds
with their individual societies. However, his brand of pessimism differs significantly, even
more shattering than what the avowed pessimists like Armah or Ouologuem can achieve.
Narration in The House of Hunger hinges on the intermittent retrospection of a ‘psychotic
mind”. Familiar events, places and persons are recalled and commented upon in an irregular
manner. Marechera, in his search for thematic preoccupations, has often turned his attention
to the subject of oppression in postcolonial Africa, so obvious, so crippling, and so
dehumanizing.
The House of Hunger is, above all, a text that deals with the effects of great events of
the external world on individual people. The issues portrayed take place in the context of war
and racism in Zimbabwe, but Marachera focuses the reader’s attention not on the events as
abstractions, but on their effects on the individual soul and the individual mind, and on
person-to-person relationship. The treatment of sex in the text is an aspect which provides
clues to understanding the nature of life and interpersonal relationship. Its value is more than
literary; it also performs artistic, political and social function. Sex is employed in the story to
signify a sort of assertiveness that can be perceived as a form of defensive mechanism
against life’s total meaninglessness and brutality. In the text, Marechera presents the
protagonist in a number of sexual escapades, ranging from his family, to his dormitory, to the
streets and to the bush. Sex, thus, becomes a metaphor of the socio-political realities of the
novelist’s homeland, which was inundated with wars and many other violent actions at that
time.
It is also revealed that, apart from being a victim of racial machinations, woman in
African also comes under the burden of sexism. Actually, Marechera, in the story, dwells on
gender-violence unleashed as a signifier of neocolonized dichotomy of another generation.
The story opens with a young revolutionary, Peter, whose young woman, Immaculate, “sweet
and childish and big with his sperm,” is flogged night and day until she is reduced to a ‘red
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stain’ (2). The brutality inflicted on Immaculate is sexually motivated; she, however, dreams of
a better future because she is pregnant. Again, the relationship between her and Peter
signifies the problem of betrayal of trust which is a pervading social phenomenon in
neocolonial Africa. The story signifies that, in the dichotomy between the colonized man and
woman, the colonized man becomes ‘the coloniser’ in a very specific sense. Therefore, the
budding colonizer (the colonized male) exclusively in his role as oppressor of the colonized
female has vested interest in continued exploitation of the doubly (sexual political) colonized
woman.
Black Sunlight is an expansion of the socio-political problems of Africa already initiated
in The House of Hunger, offering a macroscopic portrait of the black race from a perspective
of the Zimbabwean experience. Using the trope of photography, a press photographer is
depicted roving across the span of a society that is in disorder, giving hasty glimpses of the
chaos. The text is couched in a fragmentary manner, showing that the society he depicts is in
an era of turbulence, anarchy and disorder. In this work, Marechera gives a vivid view of the
new strains and tensions plaguing the African society. In fact, Black sunlight chronicles the
daily experiences in Zimbabwe, in particular, and the entire black world, in general - the story
of the black race under the siege of socio-political intrigues and multiple forms of
institutionalized violence.
In the text, Marechera is disillusioned with the past, present, and deductively, the future
of African continent. The problem of sexism recurs in Black Sunlight. The issue of socio-
political betrayal of women by their men, thus, becomes a motif in Marechera’s fiction. The
experience of colonialism lingers on in the society through the binary dichotomy between men
and women in the neocolonial period. For instance, Susan draws a similarity between her
father and the protagonist, Christian, when he tells her to “shut up” after making love to her.
To Susan, this form of verbal male violence is indicative of her father’s irritation at his own
ignorance. Here, two generations of men have betrayed Susan in curiously similar ways.
Susan recognizes the violence inherent in her chosen task as similar, if not identical, to the
destruction that societies impose on the people they claim to serve.
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In Black Sunlight, the views of women, exemplified by Susan, are not as trivial as the
political perception of Immaculate in The House of Hunger. Therefore, gender dissonance in
Black Sunlight is more eloquent and complex than the dream-versus-social-reality dialectic
we encounter in The House of Hunger. In Marechera’s fiction, sexism and capitalism are
portrayed as patriarchal concepts which can be dismantled only by women who are as brave
as Susan. This corroborates the opinion of Helene Cixous that “women… must invent the
impregnable language that will wreck partitions, classes and rhetorics, regulations and codes”
(1994:256). With courage, Susan is able to wreck sexual and rhetorical partitions in order to
give birth to a new history.
Also, in the novel, Marechera enunciates some instances of man’s inhumanity to man
among the peoples of Africa. He catalogues the sufferings of the downtrodden masses in the
hands of their leaders. The image of the African masses depicted in the text is that of people
being exploited, brutally murdered extra-judicially, hanged or detained. The masses of the
society depicted in the text wallow in poverty, starvation, unemployment and socio-political
alienation. The following scene in the text captures these gory experiences of the masses in
Africa: “The chief, as black as human beginnings, pondered. What new madness had struck
this messenger? White men indeed! The chief removed his fit from my head” (1).
The above signifies the fate of the black masses in the hands of their neocolonial
leaders. This suggests that the burden of the average African man is a double yoke. He was
oppressed by the white colonialists and now by his own brothers and sisters. The chief in the
above quoted scene is so brutal that his throne is lavishly decorated with human skulls and
“he wore nothing but a necklace made of human finger bones” (p6). These are apparently the
skulls and finger bones of his victims. Where, then, is the hope of African masses?
The above highlighted episode suggests that despite his physical absence from his
motherland, Marechera still contributes to the debate on the quest for a viable political
leadership in Africa through his works. A careful reading of his texts reveals that leadership
should be a selfless service devoid of all traces of corruption and brutality. The question to
which Marechera seeks an answer in Black Sunlight is this: “Who can provide this true
leadership?” Is it the traditional rulers (like the tyrant chief in the text!), the politicians or the
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military? Marechera implicitly proclaims that the traditional rulers cannot be the desired
saviours because of their brutality and vainglory. He also despises military dictatorship for
being too assuming and over-zealous. Thus, Marechera’s search for political leadership in
Africa is abortive:
Was there a difference between the chief on his skull-carpentered throne and the General who
even now had grappled all power to himself in our twentieth-century image? (13)
The foregoing historicist reading of Marechera’s fiction has revealed that his stories
grew directly out of his socio-political awareness of neocolonialism; even though he was in
exile, he succeeded admirably in bridging the gap between the functional use of literature and
the ability to stir humanity as a whole. His fiction produces a feeling of hollowness. He does
not comment directly on reality; he permits reality to comment on itself. What he has offered
in his prose texts is a unique form of realism; his works are “solipsistic, post-realist texts” (Neil
Kortenaar, 1997:25). Here lies the hallmark of his fiction.
3. Buchi Emecheta: Reversing the Image of the African Woman
Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta was born on July 21, 1944, in Yaba, near Lagos,
Nigeria, to Jeremy Nwabudike and Alice Okwuekwu Emecheta. At a tender age, she was
orphaned, and she spent her early-childhood years being educated at a missionary school. In
1960, at the age of sixteen, she was married to Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she
had been engaged since she was eleven. After their marriage, Sylvester and Buchi moved to
London. The marriage which was blessed with five children was an unhappy, oft-violent one,
and it hit the rock in 1966. She was conferred with the prestigious Order of the British Empire
in 2005.
Emecheta’s fictional cosmos is on the sexual exploitation of African women and the
‘monster’, the ‘witch’, the ‘mad-woman’ stereotypes that emerge when an African woman tries
to resist patriarchy. In her texts, she engages the trouble with her motherland, including child
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slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom. Her thematic leaning towards a
redefinition of African womanhood is purposeful. This is informed by her personal agonizing
experiences of male victimization and the single-mindedness with which she has successfully
countered such hostilities. However, one notices an apparent ambivalent strain evident in her
brand of feminism, especially in her non-autobiographical novels. This is as a result of her
exposure to two cultures –African and European. Lloyd Brown (1981) comments on the status
of Buchi Emecheta as an African woman writer. Says he:
Of all women writers in contemporary African literature, Buchi Emecheta of Nigeria has been the
most sustained and vigorous voice of direct, feminist protest. Only Bessie Head of South Africa
compares with Emecheta in a certain intensity and directness when describing sexual inequality
and female dependency. In Emecheta, we detect an increasing emphasis of the woman’s sense of
self… (34).
Since the suppression of women is a global phenomenon, the African woman is also
on the march towards liberation in the literary sphere. Emecheta appears to be a frontline
feminist, dissipating the message of emancipation of the African womanhood. In most of her
prose texts, we have a depiction of the oppression of Igbo women in connection with the
claim that colonialism, classism and sexism are intertwined in the African women’s
experience of oppression. Writing from outside her native culture offers Emecheta a
conducive atmosphere to dwell on the problem of cultural, economic and gender oppression
that African women are subjected to. Actually, she denounces the negative aspects of her
traditional culture rather than celebrating its positives. She, therefore, exposes the
harmfulness of patriarchy in her communities.
Emecheta’s first two novels, In the Ditch and Second Class Citizen are feminist works
in the tradition of Edna O’Brien and Kate Millet. In addition, her domicile in England has
contributed immensely to her feminist growth. The liberal English setting obliges her to
exercise certain rights. For instance, she was able to obtain a divorce and gain custody of her
children. The African society is predominantly patriarchal and would have greatly inhibited
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such actions by a woman. Her field of study, Sociology, further exposes her to the sufferings
of womanhood in various cultures. This heightens her concern for this disadvantaged
subgroup and awakens her urges for politics of the female plight. Therefore, a combination of
factors – her diasporic identity, her personal victimization by the patriarchy and her exposure
to the works of other feminists- sharpen her consciousness. Commenting on her consistent
narration of the woes in her motherland, Emecheta says:
Some people have said that a talk which I gave at the Africa Centre a few weeks ago is unpatriotic,
but I, as a writer cannot afford to tell my people what they want to hear. If I start doing that I would
be betraying my conscience, my profession and my country (1981:2582).
Emecheta does not stop at cataloguing male hostilities; she goes on to fight them. In
reading her novels, one is aware that she is furthering the female cause. Her brand of sexual
politics is not mediocre; she extends it to the emancipation of the males. Emecheta derives
the title of her second novel, Second Class Citizen, from Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase. The
African society is depicted as a patriarchal world where man is the reference point; he defines
woman in relationship to himself. The female has no autonomy outside the male who may be
her father, husband or brother. In a traditional patriarchal society like Nigeria, this concept
strongly persists. This idea is articulated in Emecheta’s The Slave Girl. Hear her:
A girl needed men to guide her: her father, or any man who could represent a father to her, or when
she grew up a husband. So, was not her brother the rightful person to decide the fate of little
Ojebeta? (30).
Consequently, the African women are portrayed as finding themselves perpetually
trapped in this eternal triangle of the patriarchy. They are just what the apparatus decree.
Exposing further the status of the girl-child in Africa, Emecheta, in The Slave Girl, states
through, the narrator, that “a boy is like four girls put together” (p.68). She further muses on
the inessentiality of the female when she observes unenthusiastically, “Titi is only a girl” (71).
The phobia for male children is further heightened in the reaction of Adah’s parents at her
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birth. In fact, she was born when everyone in the family expected a male child; her arrival was
such a disappointment that her birth was not recorded. These instances serve to highlight the
disregard which plagues the female from infancy to adulthood in a patriarchal society like
Africa. The Slave Girl is, thus, a critique of the way women are caught in a double bind
between what tradition expects of them and the experiences of the colonial social context. In
this novel, Emecheta attempts to conscientize African women and make Africans redress
their contributions to the subjugation of African women (Sarah Anyang Agbor, 2008).
The fact that the patriarchy regards the female as an object of amusement further
reinforces his conception of her as a piece of property. A man purchases a woman in
marriage as he would any item, such as a piece of furniture, an animal or a slave. Marriage is
usually profit motivated. When Francis, in Second Class Citizen, feels threatened over Adah’s
pay packet, his father reassuringly reprimands him by observing that he should count himself
lucky for ‘possessing’ such a wife. The word ‘possessing’ is significant in the context because
what one normally possesses is a piece of property. In fact, one thing that binds Francis to
Adah is her money. Adah is the breadwinner and, to this effect, indispensable, since Francis
has an aversion to work.
In marriage, the woman takes care of the home and bears children, tasks erroneously
supposed to be fulfilling. Therefore, bearing children is highly valued. Childlessness in African
society results to the type of mental agony and shame NnuEgo, in The Joys of Motherhood, is
subjected to. This novel attempts a denunciation of women’s entrapment between the
expectations of the Igbo traditions and those of modernity. It is with ignominy that NnuEgo
relinquishes her position as the head wife. It is ironic that a father is usually a very active
participant in the drama that enacts the sale and subjugation of a daughter. The actual
marriage negotiation of NnuEgo and Amatokwo is solely conducted by the males of the
family. It is also significant that it is Ojebeta’s brother, Okolie in The Slave Girl, who sells her
into slavery to Ma Palagada. Had Ojebeta’s father, Okwuekwu Oda, been alive, she still
would have been given away in marriage. Either way, they are both versions of slavery
because they impede economic independence and self-expression.
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In addition, the female is assessed by either whose daughter or whose wife she is but
never by who she is. Married or single, a woman remains under patriarchal dominance. The
case of Ona in The Joys of Motherhood offers an apt illustration of the selfish paternal love
some women are subjected to in traditional African societies. Her father sees her as a means
through which his desired ends can be achieved. Invariably, marriage is depicted as an
extension of female enslavement. Adah, Emecheta’s persona in Second-Class Citizen,
experiences slavery in marriage in its crudest form. To Francis, her husband, Adah is like “a
yoke-fellow whose labour was crucial if he were to prosper” (14). At this juncture, it is worth
reiterating that Emecheta is a feminist writer as evinced in her autobiographical novels, In the
Ditch and Second-Class Citizen set in London. In dealing with the preliterate African
characters that are not extensions of herself, characters considered from a historical
perspective and placed in a rural context, Emecheta’s feminism becomes ambivalent as in
The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood. However, in Double Yoke, she creates a literate
female who successfully counters patriarchal victimization in the more modern and liberal
atmosphere, thus reaffirming her feminist ideology with which she started. Willful and
persistent Emecheta counters male subjugation and achieves ‘selfhood’.
In her reaffirmation of feminism in Double Yoke, Emecheta creates a “new African
woman”, that is, an emancipated female. Through the metamorphosis of the heroine, Nko, the
double standard morality pervading the African society is exposed. The female questing for
independence is a victim of the duplicity of life. The myth of the “acada” (bookish) woman, as
well as the sexual victimization that some females encounter is also explored in the text. In
addition, Emecheta advocates that the liberated woman grows simultaneously with the
modern African man.
One of Emecheta’s most recent texts, Kehinde, also dwells on the modes of patriarchal
suppression of the female in African society. It also thematizes the issues of community,
kinship, sisterhood, multiculturalism and shifting identities as they affect Nigerians both at
home in the Diaspora. The male characters are portrayed in negative images. This is with a
view to asserting the novelist’s own ‘selfhood’ and extorting other educated Nigerian women
to join the campaign for the liberation of African womanhood. In fact, in the text, Emecheta
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dwells on the predicament of African woman in the postcolonial period. Her redefinition of
African womanhood in the text is both positive and radical. This is an appropriate ideological
posture that aims to rock the patriarchal foundation on which the stereotypic female portrait is
set. The text dwells on the ideological conflict between couples. The husband (Albert), an
idealist, is ready to return home on the prompting of his sisters, but the wife (Kehinde), the
eponymous heroine of the text, is more pragmatic and realistic. She does not feel comfortable
in her home country after a long absence: “she found herself once more relegated to the
margin” (Kehinde, 97). She, therefore, prefers to stay behind at her ‘home’, in exile, which she
finds more comfortable and convenient than her original home, Nigeria. Emecheta has lived in
Britain for more than four decades. Thus, her perception is inevitably shaped by her hybrid
consciousness which is a feature of post-colonial writing (M.E.M Kolawole, 1998).
What Emecheta embarks upon in Kehinde, in a conservative patriarchy as African’s, is
a bold and remarkable quest. Adjustment will certainly occur in the consciousness of the male
who eventually will have to accept the “new African woman”. Thus, in Kehinde, Nigeria is
depicted as a nation where dreams and hopes are shattered. The protagonist, Kehinde,
dreamt of visiting a nation (Nigeria) which would not relegate her to the margins. However,
her hope dream is not fulfilled as she is given only a secondary position in relation to her
husband. Kehinde feels isolated and ridiculed during her stay at her father’s household.
Consequently, when she gets back to London, she does not miss Nigeria. London is,
therefore, her home. It is a place where Kehinde’s ‘creator’ (Emecheta) is able to have an
outright rebellion against the traditional and patriarchal values in her motherland. Ana Arce
(2000) comments critically on the possible link between Kehinde and Emecheta, with a view
to arguing that in Kehinde, Emecheta’s narrates herself:
Kehinde’s feelings could be a reflection of Emecheta’s ambivalence towards
Nigerian and English – or Western – societies. She takes what she thinks is the
best for her from both worlds and stays in the transition area. In this way, her
identity is always open and surprising to those who expect coherence from her
(82).
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The foregoing exploration of Emecheta’s narration of her motherland from the Diaspora
has revealed that she privileges stories of a world (unmistakably Nigeria) where women face
the problems of poverty and oppression. She also articulates protests against the
overwhelming power of tradition in African societies. Actually, Emecheta offers a biting
critique of Igbo cultural traditions that oppress, marginalize and contrive to enslave women.
She is, therefore, at the forefront of defending the rights of African women. Carole Boyce
Davies (1981:9), Emecheta’s fiction examines African “societies for institutions which are of
value to women and reject[ing] those that work to their detriment”. Akachi Ezeigbo (1996)
also corroborates Davies’s evaluation of the utilitarian value of Emecheta’s fiction. To
Ezeigbo, Emecheta’s fiction “exposes the injustices lined up against women so that society
could be restructured in a more equitable manner”. For instance, Aku-nna, the protagonist of
The Bride Price, rebels against the oppressive tradition of her society by choosing her own
husband regardless of societal rules. Her effrontery to choose Chike Ofulue, an Osu or slave
descendant , an outcast from the society, is Emecheta’s way of exposing on the social foibles
of her motherland.
4. Conclusion
The foregoing discussion has revealed that the prevailing point of view in the fictions of
Africans in Europe is critical and rather pessimistic, but surely not negative. The future fills the
continent with foreboding and apprehension, but it hopes to arrive. One easily notices the
familiar distaste of the writers for the ‘gleam’, delusion and unfulfilled expectations of the
present social period in postcolonial Africa. In fact, the texts examined in this paper, like many
other fictions of the African Diaspora, cast a critical and sardonic look over the social
physiology of the continent. Whatever the influences of the writers may be, they are sensitive
and exciting artists who are not “dancing to receive gifts”, but feel they are fulfilling a social
function. It is our contention in this paper that Marechera and Emecheta’s prose texts do lead
to precisely such a powerful, profound and evocative (re)assessment of the individual author’s
motherland. They transmit a vivid picture of the socio-historical realities of their enabling
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milieus and offer an insight into various aspects of the realities. Ayo Kehinde (2008) makes a
similar observation about African fiction: “in the various periods of African literature, socio-
historical and political realities are foregrounded in literary texts through the employment of
certain images and metaphors” (35).
Despite the disparity in individual experiences, what remains unchanged is the
agonizing historical cum political epoch of Africa itself and its inscription in the mental register
of a continent. The narratives of Africans in Europe, although distinctively different from one
another in that they convey different personal experiences of the same neocolonial
disillusionment, are still joined by the need to express such memories and expose the
misdeeds of the African neocolonial rulers to the world. Therefore, African fiction writers in
Europe are truly translating reality into language, and they are meticulously interrogating the
conditions of human existence and (un)recorded history of African neocolonies. Their artistic
mission is to present an image of Africa that is ruined by the rancour of decadence.
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