252. God Dies by the Nile by Nawal El Saadawi

God Dies by the Nile* (Zed Books, FP: 1976; 175) by Nawal El Saadawi is a compendium of political, cultural, social, and religious oppression of a people by a demagogue through a supposed ruling class whom he gets to do what he wants. In this book, Nawal El Saadawi, whose subject of interest revolves around [religious] oppression in a patriarchal society, discusses how a people blinded by religion could become delusional in their depravity and even deemed it the will of God.

In this story, set in the village of Kafr El Teen, the Mayor is God, his word is law, and his passions reign supreme. And when this lascivious Mayor set his eyes on the children of an old woman, Zakeya, there was nothing anyone could do but to submit, even if it had to take the Sheikh to turn the words of Allah around to deceive the masses and an unfortunate and helpless woman. Everyone was blinded to the Mayor's deeds and all worked to not only protect him but also praise him to the hilt so that in grovelling before him, their daily bread would be assured. After a girl - Nefissa - in his household got pregnant, delivered and deserted the town and the baby entirely, the Mayor descended on the girl's younger sister. And for a man who felt incomplete and who would do anything to show his invisible superiority to anyone in the village and in his family, there was no settling for a negative responses or giving up.

This book documents the impotence of the people in dealing with this one individual who considered himself the purveyor of their daily bread but who also made their lives horrible and made them do things against their will. He set people up, falsely accused them, had them jailed or killed in the realisation of his needs. And even though the people were unhappy about this glaring abuse, they were crippled and incapacitated by the fear of the repercussions that would ripple through the village should any attempt be made; for he had the capacity to increase taxes, take away farm lands, and even to ostracise recalcitrant offenders. Consequently, no one tried.

There is a lot packed within this novella. However, there are too many characters for this thin book that hardly any character was completely developed. There was a sense of detachment and no emotional affinity towards the characters even though a very despicable and grief-laden story was being told. In addition to this, most of them were extremely wicked. They worked against their own people, turning their heads away from whatever was prevailing, if they were not contributing to it. Even Zakeya's nephew who had come from a war he had described as useless to witness the wickedness being heaved upon his family could do and think of nothing other than marriage. In the end, he was framed up for theft and whisked away without resistance, for being the obstacle between Zeinab and the Mayor. 

Also the men were like automatons, they only did what they were asked to do. For instance, Nefissa's father beat him upon the advice of the village barber - Haj Ismail - who had come to convince him to allow his daughter to work at the Mayor's house; this was after he had hold the Haj Ismail that his daughter was not in agreement with that decision and Haj Ismail had in turn asked him who was the head of the house. This was repeated again with Fatheya's father - again for a similar action: refusal to marry the Mayor.

As a final cap of the 'male-bashing' literature, men were accused for the nude pictures of women on posters and advertising boards in Cairo when Zakeya made the journey to visit the mosque she had been directed to.

In addition, there was a lot of depravity in this story and this emboldened Nawal's relations with her male characters. Mostly, these were threads that could have been trimmed to improve the punch of the story if not for her affinity for the portraying men in such light. There was a man who had a personal sex life with an Ox; another with dead bodies; the Sheikh himself was raped by his uncle when he was young and he in turn married a child; and the Mayor was sexually abusive. The story of the man who slept with dead bodies was superfluous to the story. It just hanged in the story and linked to nothing. Same could be said for Kafrawi's sex life with the Ox. In fact, this bestial encounter was so descriptive that the reader is likely to be deceived that it was in reference to a lady. As if these depravities were not enough, the woman - the Sheikh's young wife - who had adopted Nefissa's daughter was beaten to death with the baby when she stood against a mob - made up entirely of men - who had accused the baby of being the cause of their recent problems; the problems being the social dissonance the Mayor had caused with his actions.

The story was also predictive in a way. Every chapter begins with a confusing description or narrative but it ultimately came down to a man who was doing evil, or a woman who was being abused. There were also some repetitive descriptions and phrases [too close to each other]. For instance, the way the sun set, the way a father beat the daughter and others, were so similar that the reader might wrongly think that he or she was repeating a page already read. For instance:

 His fingers let go of his whiskers, and he gave a sudden gasp like a drowning man when he comes to the surface. [49]

then on the next page 

She gave a sudden gasp of relief like a drowning woman who unexpectedly finds herself a the surface [50]

However, Nawal El Saadawi managed to send her message through, in the midst of these structural deficiencies. One could not help but frown upon such issues as Female Genital Mutilation and Child Marriage that were forcefully brought to the fore.

Religion played a strong role in this story. For instance the question of who is 'God' in the novel is important for the overall appreciation of the story. First, God could be a metaphor for the Mayor, who took upon himself certain key characteristics of God: infallibility, purveyor of human provisions, the law maker, and incontestability. Thus, his death - which occurred at the stroke of a hoe - is what the title encapsulates. However, the Mayor could be the personification of Islam (or Allah), which the author vituperatively spoke about. Thus, in this interpretation, the abuse of the people will be the direct outcome of Islam in practice. There are several places that this was directly or indirectly suggested. For instance, in his quest to get Zeinab into his household the Mayor and his coterie of friends deceived Zakeya through a Sheikh in a Mosque in Cairo. Here, prayers [a certain number] and recitations [a certain number] were used to deceive Zakeya into believing that she was being healed by Allah and that for it to be complete Allah had requested that she sent her daughter Zeinab to the home of the Mayor. In another situation, when Zakeya was imprisoned for the murder of the Mayor and she realised all that had occurred she suddenly had an epiphanic moment:

But every now and then the men around her could see her mutter, like someone talking to herself. She kept repeating in a low voice, 'I know who it is. Now I know him.' ... She stared into the dark with open eyes but her lips were always tightly closed. But one of the prisoners heard her mutter in a low voice, 'I know who it is.' And the woman asked her curiously, 'who is it my dear?'

And Zakeya answered, 'I know it's Allah, my child.'

'Where is He?' sighed her companion. 'If He were here, we could pray Him to have mercy on women like us.'

'He's over there, my child. I buried him there on the bank of the Nile.' 

This alternative explanation leads to the total repudiation of Allah as the overseer of life and the provider of compassion as shown subtly in the response: 'if He were here, we could pray Him to have mercy on women like us.' There is a sense of disbelief and mistrust in that statement.

Could the current Egyptian crisis therefore be, not necessarily a repudiation of religion, a repudiation of all the numerous Gods (Mayors) who had stifled the people? Could it be a spontaneous outburst of withheld emotions? However, this must be answered as cautiously as possible since Egypt is not a religious state and therefore an extrapolation of Kafr El Teen to Egypt cannot be linearly made. Also note that when Zakeya left her village to Cairo, she was amazed by the unbridled life the people lived to the extent that she became dizzy. 

The book is not Nawal's finest, though I had problems with Searching, her only other book I have read. The problem with Searching was her description of men. Not the prose. In this book it is both. It is important that anyone who intends to read Nawal El Saadawi understands that she is not charitable with her male characters. They are as bad as they could possibly be and most of the time caricatured. This book is therefore cautiously recommended. If not for the buzz that surrounds this book, I would have suggested a skip, but it is important for one to read to come to a personal conclusion.

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*A selection of the Book and Discussion Club for the month of July. Follow discussions on the book on twitter by clicking on the #wpghbookclub.

About the author: Read the author's profile here

170. Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

Title: Burger's Daughter

Author: Nadine Gordimer

Genre: Fiction/Race/Struggle

Publisher: Penguin

Pages: 361

Year of First Publication: 1979

Country: South Africa

Read for the Top 100 Books Reading Challenge and the Africa Reading Challenge

Nadine Gordimer's Burger's Daughter is not an easy read. The author, probably mirrored the lives of the people: natives and the whites who were against the apartheid system at the time, in her prose. For reading this seemingly melancholic novel, the reader would feel the desolation, the destruction, the emotional torture, the emasculation of ideas and of works, the impotency of one filled with verve without a vent or valve. The reader would go through several tortuous moments, reflecting the lives of a people who would not bend to division, destruction and death no matter how well it is shrouded and how white the shroud is. And these feeling of pain, emanating from the book, does not result from the use of verbose adjectives or adverbs but the use of language itself. The pain is in the read. In this book, Gordimer, somewhat answers partly a question that has been bothering some observers of South African apartheid system and which was also the centrepiece of Steve Biko's I write What I like; the question of whether the South African Liberals, those who vociferously and vituperatively spoke against apartheid, were for real and why they never forwent the privileges that were preserved specifically for them. Fictitious as this story may be, it still shows that there were several white South Africans who were willing to brave death to see the collapse of that vile and humongous system than to live and partake of it.

The book explores the issue of struggle and what it takes to be the child of a revolutionary father and more especially a white revolutionary fighting and dying for policies and laws, changes that would benefit blacks. It also explores the loss of childhood that most of these fighters and their children go through; how they suddenly become adults, unbeknownst to them, and how the struggle charts their lives. Another question, more importantly a puzzle, which is currently been portrayed in the Kony 2012 Campaign, which the book attempted to resolve without seeming success is the issue of the equalness of human value. Most of the time, an issue becomes a concern to the world - or the international community as they are referred to - only when a single white person has been subjected to it, regardless of the fact that those prevailing conditions, of which this white individual suffered, is the reality of several non-white folks, in this book, blacks. For instance, when Lionel Burger - Rosa Burger's father - was jailed for life for his alleged treasonable conduct and died in prison, Rosa Burger became a star attraction at most of these human-rights-freedom-fighters-liberals luncheons and dinners, even though countless blacks had suffered similar fate. This issue converges into the suspicion that blacks harboured even for whites who could be seen supporting or working for their cause. It is also that which makes the black men in the police be seen as victims of circumstances and therefore not part of the enemies that white policemen were.

Gordimer also investigated what it takes to be a clean-conscience white South African and if such a thing is possible regarding the prevailing conditions. Here, she was much more concerned about the sins of the fathers following the children; how people would perceive an individual - a white - who says he or she is a South African. Do people link you to the atrocities taking place? Or would they treat you in isolation? This identity-burden is one of the themes covered in the story.

The story, written in different narrative styles alternating between an omniscient narrator and Rosa Burger's own first person narrative, is divided into three parts. The first part concerns Rosa's parents and her life in South Africa. Her parent's involvement in the fight against apartheid, life in their home, and their visit to and from prison and sometimes imprisonment was the subject. Rosa's home was teeming with blacks and whites. It was a place - even when the separate places policies was in full swing - where the race border breaks down. Even though the Burgers lives were not like other white South Africans, they had to contend with every day mishaps life showers on people. They went through the loss of a young son and friends and betrayal. However, Cathy and Lionel stood firm in their belief in their chosen paths. Even then young Rosa understood, without any indoctrination, what her parents were doing and accepted it. In the first part, Rosa's narrative mostly addressed a man she had a brief affair with, Conrad. When her parents were alive, she felt shielded, somewhat, and even participated in some of their clandestine activities. During this period, she never thought of leaving the country, and because she had been named together with her parents she was not entitled to a South African passport. Outside the Burgers' home, they had to contend with state policies especially in public institutions over which they had no control; so that even though Rosa and gone to school with Baasie, Lionel's black comrade, the two had to separate as they moved from the kindergarten/primary stage. An event that would later come to haunt her in faraway Europe. After her father died in prison and her mother died from a debilitating disease and the house was sold, Rosa would move from one place to the next until, a few years after, she would decide to leave South Africa, altogether. Rosa had worked in South Africa as a physiotherapist.

The second part deals with Rosa's foray in Europe, mostly France and how she deals with her father's first wife and life in general. Here her ability to stay away from liberal activities will be tested. Rosa will have an affair with a married man (her first lover), working on his doctoral thesis; however, this will not be the defining moments in her life. The defining moments would come when she met Baasie at a programme organised by liberals. In this chance encounter, when Rosa was not able to identify his childhood friend, sparks would fly for definitely Bassie, whose father had also died in prison, had gone through several transformations whose complexities have, probably, been exacerbated by his colour. Baasie's accusation of Rosa was based on her using her father's death as a launch-pad for fame and that this is a singular event a white man suffered; an event that is the reality of countless whites. Fumed by this clearly abrasive accusation Rosa countered and enumerated all the sufferings they had to bear for what they believed in. But it would not be what Baasie said that would get her visiting South Africa, it would be what Rosa herself told Baasie. Rosa's narrative, in this section, addressed her father's biographer.

The third part is when Rosa came back to South Africa. She went to work as a physiotherapist but the activities of her father, and the name Burger and her inability to dissociate her personal struggle from the overall struggle that would come haunting. In 1976, the Soweto uprising was in full force and the police also met them fully prepared. What followed were countless mangled bodies and broken bones. A year later, Rosa would be arrested and charged for her participation in advancing the cause of the ANC and inciting the revolt. Rosa mostly called unto his father, in this period.

Gordimer's creativity was at its best. She unleashed the full force of her creative prowess, and gave the reading public the beautiful narrative that would, if it had not already, become a classic. Yet, what this book achieves is not the beauty of prose or lines, but the documentation of a period of life in the lives of a people that need not be repeated, no matter what. 

Again, this is a relatively difficult book but one that deserves to be read.

__________________

About the author: Read it here.

ImageNations' Rating: 5.0/6.0

167. Madmen and Specialists by Wole Soyinka

Title: Madmen and Specialists

Author: Wole Soyinka

Genre: Play/Political

Publisher: University Press PLC

Pages: 77

Year of First Publication: 1971

Country: Nigeria

Read for the Africa Reading Challenge

Wole Soyinka's play Madmen and Specialists have made me think twice about this genre. This is the first book I can boldly say 'it went over my head. I never got it.' Perhaps it was the mentality I carried into the book: I went into the book knowing that Soyinka's plays have deeper meanings other than its superficial mirth he creates with verve, which burdened me so that after three days of labouring through a 77-page book, finally turning over the last page, I still could not put the various issues together to create one coherent idea. This play, which was written when the author was in prison during Nigeria's Civil War, is sad and gloom, unlike The Lion and the Jewel. 

The story opens with a quartet of mendicants: Aafa, an arrogant, sarcastic and self-style leader of the four, Goyi who was somewhat positive or optimistic and appreciative and had a contraption that held him in stooping position, Blindman and Cripple wagering parts of their bodies in a dice game. These four beggars had become afflicted during the war and had now set up their camp on a route that led to Dr Bero's house and would do anything to get people to give them money including faking paroxysms. Together with Dr Bero, the quartet had formed the Cult of As. Dr Bero, who was once a physician had become a Specialist in torturing people during the war. This had had a psychological effect on him. Back home he had kept their raving and demented father in a room, like an oubliette, and had tasked the quartet mendicants to keep watch and prevent his sister from entering the room in which their father was kept, even though Si Bero did not know the condition their father was in and also did not know that his brother had retuned from the war. However, overlooking them were two old women: Iya Agba and Iya Mate, who had helped Si Bero keep her brother's practice going in his absence. The Cult of As, under the influence of the demented Old Man had become cannibals for it was the idea of legalising the eating human flesh that pushed him, the Old Man, to join his son in the war. 

Later, when Si Bero saw that her brother had arrived from the war, she asked him of their father. He initially lied flatly but she found the lie and persistently questioned him. Dr Bero was furious that the old women were living in that part of his compound and wanted them to leave and was even more furious when they demanded payment for helping Si Bero keep his concern going and yet would not state the form in which the payment should be. Here it was clear that even though Dr Bero was furious and threatened to sack the women, he never really was able to do carry it. Back in the room where the Old Man was hidden, a political discussion was going on amongst the quartet and the Old Man. They talked about politicians and their tricks, about promises that are broken just as they were spoken and they talk about whom to kill. Finally, Goyi would be trapped and offered for food. During all these, Dr Bero was thinking of ways to kill his father; perhaps they were both mad men and specialists.

The story seems to be about the political inefficiencies, the selfishness of the politicians, their greed and their double-barreled mouths that say a thing today and another a different day. It is about the inhumanity of their thought; as to what makes them do what they do, that went unanswered and I'm not sure Soyinka intended to ask or answer that question.

Have you read this book? Tell me what you think. Let this be an open review. I really would want to get more from this.

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About the Author: Click here.

153. Maru by Bessie Head

Title: Maru

Author: Bessie Head

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: AWS Classics

Pages: 103

Year of First Publication: 1971

Country: Botswana/South Africa

In this book Bessie Head tackled an incipient but dangerous problem that Africans are not eager to confront but which had been the bane of the continent, stalling every development and fomenting and precipitating civil wars. Almost every crisis in Africa is either caused by this or act as a catalyst. It led to the electoral crisis in Kenya, the genocide in Rwanda, the Liberian war, the Ivorian crisis and more. Racism has been amongst us and has retarded our progress so much so that had it being eliminated a larger portion of our problems would have been solved concomitantly. For instance, if there were no internal racism (mostly referred to as tribalism or ethnicism) most forms of corruptions would be no more.

Today in every country, there are those who think the country belongs to them and look upon all others (tribes) as inferior and squatters deserving only the crumbs. This problem had become pronounced due to the great diversity within Africa's gene pool so that in a country the variation among people is as much as there are of ethnic or tribal groups. And because politics is about power and numbers corrupt politicians have fallen on this - whipping up sentiments, making ignorant and absolutely stupid ethically-biased statements.  In Botswana, the Masarwa tribe is one of those that have suffered extreme racial segregation. Even when the larger population were struggling against the western racialism they kept the Basarwa (or the Bushmen, their name itself deeply derogatory) as slaves. According to the Tswana people the Basarwa people cannot think, the very argument used against them by the western segregationists; they are considered not different from animals and are counted as part of the animals that inhabit the Kalahari. In this book, Bessie Head shows what a Basarwa (a girl in this case) can do when given the opportunity apart from hunting, gathering, herbal medicine and the art they are known for and the slaves the end up becoming. This is the subject matter of Bessie Head's novella Maru.

A Basarwa woman died after giving birth to a daughter. But because she is a Basarwa and an untouchable the people called on Margaret Cadmore, a white teacher, to attend to the thing. She also taught her several things including literature and art.She also taught her several things including literature and art. Margaret took the daughter and named her after herself, having had no child of her own. The young Margaret had to endure discrimination at school and had it not been her adopted mother, who ensured that she put those who laughed at her in their proper places, life would have been highly unbearable for her. And even though her colour could have allowed her to blend and be passed for a half-caste - a product of a black and white parents, which is itself considered as an abnormality but still above the Masarwa people - Margaret insisted on identifying herself with her people the first time she found out who she was and the meaning of the name of her people.

Fortunately for young Margaret she was a good student and with a British for a mother - albeit adopted - her English and the tonality of her voice was excellent. After she completed training college and her adopted mother left for her home country, young Margaret would be posted to a Delipe to teach at the Leseding School. There she met Dikeledi, the late chief's daughter, also a teacher at the school; the two quickly struck acquaintance. 

Dikeledi was in love with Moleka, a womaniser notorious for changing women like clothes and sending her rejects fleeing town or walking the streets talking to themselves. He had eight children with eight different women and there was no end in sight. Moleka found a place for Margaret. When Dikeledi got to know that Margaret was Masarwa she was amazed and advised her to keep it quiet as no one would suspect it, but she wouldn't hear of it. On the first day at school the head-teacher was all over himself, having already concluded that she was a half-caste, until he got to know that Margaret was a Masarwa and that was when the problem began. Afraid of parents revolting against this, of their children being thought by one of those things, he set out to devise a plan that would make life so much uncomfortable for Margaret so that she would leave by herself or get her sack, regardless of the fact that she had the best grades (in fact, he had started doubting if she never received help along the way and had sworn to investigate this matter).

Moleka had been taken in by Margaret's beauty, politeness, and mannerisms. He was now like a mad man. As a man of importance, he couldn't go out with one of the Masarwa people, what would people say about him? This dilemma glazed his eyes so much so that he saw through Dikeledi. The first thing he did was to release all his Masarwa slaves. And when the head-teacher prep Margaret's students to laugh at their teacher and ask her if she were a Masarwa and if so how could she teach them (the situation was saved Dikeledi whose no-nonsense attitude and education turned her into a somewhat strong woman) Moleka invited the head teacher into his house and invited him to eat with them all, including the recently-released Masarwa slaves. Infuriated the head-teacher left and fled the town.

Dikeledi's brother and heir-apparent, Maru, who had been away when Margaret made her entry into Dilepe was informed of all the happenings in the village by his spy, Ranko. Maru would also work on an elaborate plan that would entwine Dikeledi to Moleka and free him to whisk Margaret away.

This is a love story of some sorts but it is not romance-filled, even by 1970s African standards and the focus is not on building a suspense as to what would happen. The story begins with Maru married to Margaret; thus, the story is more about exposing how the Masarwa people are treated. Though the means by which Margaret was married, without her explicit consent for she loved Moleka (because Maru never showed any sign of love), bothered me. However, like most of Bessie's works there were a bit of surrealism in it where Maru and Margaret dreamt the same dreams. This is believed to be the activity of Maru's totems. Narrated in one long flashback, without chapters or numbered sections, in two parts, this is a fast read; it does away with any unnecessary issues and addresses what the author wants to say.

This is the most accessible of all three of Bessie Head's stories I have read. The importance of this story lies in the fact that even today the Masarwa are being discriminated against. There are stories of their total extinction and the loss of a culture, carefully preserved, because their lands have been found to contain diamonds.

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About the author: Click here to read about Bessie Head.

128. I Write What I Like by Steve Biko

Title: I Write What I Like

Author: Steve Biko

Genre: Non-Fiction/Essays/Letters

Publishers: Picador Africa

Pages: 244

Year of First Publication: 1978

Country: South Africa

On January 8, 2012, the African National Congress, the ruling party of South Africa marked its centenary and to celebrate that I decided to read this book. Though Steve Biko ran parallel organisations, The Black Conscious Movement, which was basically to empower blacks to stand for themselves and fight for what they believe in and its political wing the Black Peoples Convention, he has come to symbolise the South Africa's fight against the barbaric and inhuman attitudes meted by the white minority, Boers and even in his writings recognised the ANC has the main group for the old guards like Mandela, Sisulu and others. Thus, instead of talking about Mandela, who is already known, I chose to talk about Steve Biko.

I Write What I Like is a compendium of articles, essays, letters and memoranda by the freedom-fighter-turned-martyr, Bantu Steve Biko. In this collection, put together after his death in police detention in 1977, Steve Biko shares his views and aspirations for a country under apartheid. He visualises and cuts the path that would see blacks move from their lethargic acceptance and grumbling to an energy state where they would see themselves as the only saviours they have and need. As a do-it-yourself person, Steve Biko, early on, saw the struggle against apartheid not as a liberalist fight. For the liberals, mostly white, through no fault of theirs have been born into a system that gives them privileges and rights not earned by any other South African, black or coloured. It is this realisation and his philosophising of the black man's conditions that would become the core of his actions. He saw the liberals as not doing enough to change the status-quo they enjoy, as trying to tell the black man what is good for him. 

Nowhere is the arrogance of the liberal ideology demonstrated so well as in their insistence that the problems of the country can only be solved by a bilateral approach involving both black and white. [21]

As a testimony to their claim of complete identification with blacks, they call a few 'intelligent and articulate' blacks to 'come around for tea at home', where all present ask each other the same old hackneyed question 'how can we bring about change in South Africa?' The more such tea-parties one call the more of a liberal he is and the freer he shall feel from guilt that harness and binds his conscience. [23]

The liberal must understand that the days of the Noble Savage are gone; that the blacks do not need a go-between in this struggle for their own emancipation. [27]

Liberal organisations such as the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) whose executives were mostly white and which push 'no harder' the problems blacks faced were seen as ineffective in the struggle against apartheid. It was only fitting that the first organisation Steve Biko would form would be a Students' organisation, for he saw the lacuna between the old and young black South Africans. Whereas some of the old were afraid to act, were torn between the Bantustan policies that was trying to divide and rule the country by diverting black South African's attention from the fight against apartheid to a struggle amongst themselves, and some were too slow for young, Biko saw an opportunity to bridge this gap. The South African Students' Organistion (SASO) was formed as a platform to address and push problems facing non-white students.

Biko's ideology was to awakened the catatonic soul of the black man that has made him unresponsive to the daily abuse he receives at the hands of the white man in South Africa. He challenged a system that deemed it best to preserve jobs for a certain category of people based on their skin colour. He criticised a system where blacks were deemed to be illiterate even though the system prevented them from receiving proper education. And his expansive knowledge of issues made him walk in and out of courtrooms and trials a happy man even though he received several detentions and bans. He saw the social vices of blacks, like stealing, murder, fighting, sexual promiscuity, not as an inherent or congenital trait - as preached about by the Nationalist party and some Priests - but as a consequence of the system; a system where the influx control or 72-hour clause restricts Africans to a given district and prohibits movement from one district to the other without government permit to last for more than 72 hours. 

Again, Biko - though religious in a broader sense of the word - saw the harm that Christianity was causing. According to him, the black man does not find himself in the bible and the preaching does not reflect his situation. He made several statements that highlighted the incongruity between the Christianity the white missionaries brought and the practice of that Christianity. For instance, he bemoaned the daily atrocities meted out to blacks in South Africa and intimated

The anachronism of a well-meaning God who allows people to suffer continually under an obviously immoral system is not lost to young blacks who continue to drop out of Church by the hundreds. [34]

To him the bible must be seen to preach against white supremacy and allow blacks to see the evilness of that system rather than making them 'soul-dead' citizens who are seen to be eternally carrying the cross of Christ, waiting for their reward somewhere in heaven. He writes

The bible must not be seen to preach that all authority is divinely instituted. It must rather preach that it is sin to allow oneself to be oppressed. The bible must continually be shown to have something to say to the black man to keep him going in his journey towards realisation of the self. [34]

It is in view of this that Steve Biko advocated for Black Theology, which according to him

... seeks to depict Jesus as a fighting God who saw the exchange of Roman money - the oppressor's coinage - in His father's temple as so sacrilegious that it merited a violent reaction from Him - the Son of Man. [34]

Because a larger population of the South African society were Christians and because the individual priests - black or white - wield enough power in their communities, Steve Biko avoided antagonising them but rather prep them with what is wrong, to work to awaken the self of the African rather than continuously preaching the of Jesus walking water, among others.

Later, Biko formed the Black Conscious Movement, with its political wing the Black Peoples Convention, whilst still working for the Black Community Programme. With BCP Biko worked with the people to build clinics, to let them know that there is more they can do for themselves. All these were done under the watchful eyes of the security system. There several arrests, several deaths in detentions, several demonstrations and several shootings and deaths.

Steve Biko also fought the Bantustan policy where about 13 percent of the land were given to over 80 percent of South Africa population (the non whites) to form homelands. Though some of the leaders like Gatsha Buthelezi, Lucas Mangope, Kaizer Matanzima accepted and later ruled the Zulu, Tswana, and Transkei territories, Steve saw a divide and rule tactics inherent in the system. He saw how the National Party was fighting to divert the struggle to among the people so that instead a united Azania, Steve's name for South Africa, they would be approaching the struggle as different units of people making it ineffective.

After 101 days in detention under Section 6 of the Terrorism, Biko was again banned and restricted to his locality of King but not before he sent a memorandum to a visiting American diplomat, Senator Dick Clark, on American policy towards South Africa. In it he made some demands; but before those remarks, Steve wrote:

Besides, the sin of omission, America has often been positively guilty of working in the interests of the minority regime to the detriment of the interests of black people. America's foreign policy seems to be guided by a selfish desire to maintain an imperialistic stranglehold on this country irrespective of how the blacks were made to suffer. [159]

His restriction to King meant that he does not talk to not more than one person at a time, that two people in addition to him is a crowd, that his name is not mentioned anywhere that nothing he writes is ever to be read at any place. These were to wipe his name from the minds of the people. But Biko survived it all, including death. In August of 1977 he was arrested and through the usual police brutalities sustained brain injuries. Here the evil of apartheid was seen in all its 'glory'. For after the police had hit his head against the wall he was left, chained to the window grille, to recover so that the interrogation would proceed. On September 11, 1977 he, he was loaded in the back of a police Land Rover, naked and chained and was driven on a 1100-km journey to Pretoria to a prison with hospital facilities. He died on September 12, 1977 at the Pretoria prison.

This version by Picador Africa includes a memoir, Martyr of Hope: A Personal Memoir, by Aelred Stubbs an Anglican Priest Steve had close friendship with, sharing his fears and aspirations and considering him as his father.

Steve's death, at the age of 31, caused international protests leading to the UN arms embargo on South Africa. I Write What I Like was a column Steve Biko wrote in SASO newsletters under the pseudonym of Frank Talk. It is through these writings that he shared his visions. This book is recommended to all those who love international politics, who want to know more about a young man's quest for equality. 

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Brief Bio: Bantu Stephen Biko was born in Tylden in the Eastern Cape on the 18 th December 1946, the third child of the late Mathew Mzingaye and Alice Nokuzola “Mamcethe” Biko. He attended primary school in King William's Town and secondary school at Marianhill, a missionary school situated in a town of the same name in KwaZulu-Natal. Steve Biko went on to register for a degree in medicine at the Black Section of the Medical School of the University of Natal in 1966.

Very early in his academic program Biko showed an expansive search for knowledge that far exceeded the realm of the medical profession, ending up as one of the most prominent student leaders. In 1968, Biko and his colleagues founded the South African Students' Organisation (SASO).

With the seeds of Black Consciousness having been sown outside of student campuses, Biko and his colleagues argued for a broader based black political organization in the country. Opinion was canvassed and finally, in July 1972, the Black People's Convention (BPC) was founded and inaugurated in December of the same year. Inspired by Biko's growing legacy the youth of the country at high school level mobilized themselves in a movement that became known as the South African Students Movement (SASM). This movement played a pivotal role in the 1976 Soweto Uprisings, which accelerated the course of the liberation struggle. The National Association of Youth Organizations was also formed in order to cater for the youth more generally. (Read more here)

Rating: 6.0/6.0

126. The Conservationist by Nadine Gordimer

Title: The Conservationist

Author: Nadine Gordimer

Genre: Fiction/Race

Publishers: Penguin Books

Pages: 267

Year of First Publication: 1974

Country: South Africa

Mehring is rich, divorced and somewhat frustrated and, though he has a lot of highly-placed friends, he feels alienated. He also deals in pig-iron, so he doesn't classify himself as part of the oppressors regarding the use of cheap black labour in the mines. But Mehring has a farm as most rich South Africans do. In the context and setting of the story, rich is synonymous to white. Though Mehring has a farm, he does not run it for profit. He sees the farm as a place to escape to from the city and he knows nothing about farming so that blacks like Jacobus and Solomon and others are the ones who run the farm and these individuals were living on the land before it was purchased from the previous owner.

One day, the body of a black man was found on the farm. Mehring was called and he in turn called the police but because it was a black man, no investigations were conducted and the body was buried on location without any fuss. But when farm got flooded after a heavy downpour, the body was uncovered and the locals on Mehring's farm offered him a befitting burial using materials they could gather or borrow. It is the appearance of the dead black man on his farm that got Mehring thinking of his own death and succession.

Mehring was rich but never happy. His wife had divorced him and lived in the US, speaking to him only through her lawyer, and his son is estranged from him because he wouldn't serve in the military and had perspectives about life different from his father's. Thus, Mehring's riches had fewer spenders. But he also had a peculiar thinking, a kind that has ravaged modern thoughts, that he could obtain everything he wants with his money, including women, sex and love. However, seeing the way the poor black folks live on his farm - and he was considered a conservationist at least by the author because he would not allow anyone to take any wild animal from the farm including eggs laid by the guinea fowls - Mehring began thinking of whom the land he farms really belong to. He also felt lonely so that at one point he had to spend his New Year with the black workers on his farm. He knew that the locals were there before the first purchase, before his predecessor and will be there when he was gone. The land will not be truly his even though he had some papers showing that he had purchased and paid for it. The people's claim to it was ancestral and their attachment to it was not cultivated but connatural. 

There'll be dissatisfaction because they were here when he came, they were squatting God knows how long before he bought the place and they'll expect to have their grandchildren squatting long after he's gone. [202]

These were the kinds of thoughts and ruminations, mixed with his own mortality and death, that plagued Mehring in his daily rounds even as he travelled from Japan to South America to Jamaica and back to South Africa and to his farm, making him look like one who was less satisfied with his life than the poor folks were with their poverty. What opened up these wounds was when his workers, especially Jacobus, talk of how his son - Terry - would take over from him after he had finished his school.

With the floods, storms and the destruction of Mehring's farm, Nadine Gordimer's The Conservationist could be considered a metaphor and interpreted as the conditions that blacks found themselves in. It could also be considered as a premonition of what was to come. For instance, when the storm came, a tiny ditch carrying trickles of water, in normal rainy weather, accumulated so much water as to carry away cars driven two white South Africans:

But who could ever have imagined that the trickle of water that sometimes dried up altogether for months on end so that that gully was nothing more than a culvert full of khaki-weed and beer cartons thrown in by the blacks, the trickle of water that in normally rainy weather was never more than a gout from the big round concrete pipe that contained it under the road, could become a force to carry away a car and its occupants. [235]

In some way, these gathering floods, which forced Mehring to finally abandon his farm and emigrate to 'one of those countries white people go to', could be taken to be the political force that was gathering in apartheid South Africa in the 1960s and 1970s. With this kind of interpretation one will summarise as: the police (white) bearing the authority of the government (white) only covered the dead stranger (black) on a land inhabited by blacks but paid for by whites; but after the floods (political upheavals) the body came up and Mehring (settlers) ran away to wherever he came from in the first place and the people buried their dead because he was one of them in colour and spirit and took over their land. 

Using a mix of narrative formats and deliveries, Gordimer told the story from within the mind of Mehring so that we get to know his fears, even when he was only mentally projecting or playing around with it, and his person. In effect Mehring opened up his consciousness, or the author made him to, to the reader without restriction and this is what makes the book not only an interesting read but also a difficult and discomfiting to get around, at one point reading the 'I', at another 'You', at other places the omniscient takes over. The denser and seemingly impregnable nature makes the reader uncomfortable mentally and physically, as if one is crumpling under a burden and which he cannot also set aside.

The Conservationist was a joint winner of the 1974 Man-Booker Prize.

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Brief Bio: Nadine Gordimer (born 20, November 1923) is a South African writer and political activist. She is the daughter of Isidore and Nan Gordimer. She has lived all her life, and continues to live, in South Africa. Gordimer's writing has long dealt with moral and racial issues, particularly apartheid in South Africa. She was active in the anti-apartheid movement, joining the African National Congress during the days when the organisation was banned. She has recently been active in HIV/AIDS causes. 

As a writer she was awarded the 1991 Nobel Prize in Literature when she was recognised as a woman 'who through her magnificent epic writing has - the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity'. Her principal works include A Guest of Honour, The Conservationist, Burger's Daughter, July's People, A sport of Nature, My Son's Story, None to Accompany Me, Jump, Why Haven't you Written: Selected Stories 1950-1972, The Essential Gesture, On Mines and The Black Interpreters. (Sources: Wikipedia & Nobel Prize)

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Read for the Top 100 Books Reading Challenge

124. So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ

Title: So Long a Letter*

Author: Mariama Bâ
Translator: Madupe Bode-Thomas

Genre: Fiction

Publishers: African Writers Series Classics
Original Language: French

Pages: 97

Year of First Publication: 1979

Country: Senegal

Mariama Bâ's epistolary novella, So Long a Letter, voted as one of the best African books in the twentieth Century, is a commentary on Senegal's, and by extension Africa's, patriarchal society and the role of tradition and customs in maintaining and perpetuating the status quo. To some extent, the novella also portrays certain inherent weaknesses in some women when faced with the opportunity to finally take flight. It also opens up such feminist topics as polygamy, providing a different angle to the old story from a woman's perspective. Consequently, it has been described in some quarters as the first African feminist book and the author's overt use of 'New African Woman', 'Independence', 'Liberation' and similes and metaphors of similar meanings might have spurred this explicit description.

Ramatoulaye, the protagonist, is writing to inform her childhood friend, Aissatou, of the death of her husband, Modou. The writing of the letter itself - a cascade of past pleasures and present pain collected through a selective process to assuage her present predicament - and its sharing are part of Ramatoulaye's personal therapy, regarding Aissatou as someone with whom she shares similar fate after Aissatou had gone through and come out of the other end of the mills and ills of marriage - divorce - a better woman.

As the letter unfolds we get to know the exact causes of her pains, the extent of her suffering in the last five years of marriage until Modou's eventual death and the botheration she was going through even after his death from his family members stealing the family's properties to his brother proposing marriage at his brother's funeral. Ramatoulaye's husband of twenty years (at the time) had married their daughter's best friend, Binetou, leaving her to her fate and shirking all responsibilities as a husband and a father of a dozen children. But the major question or problem Mariama Bâ tends to answer with the Ramatoulaye character was her decision to remain married to a man who had, for all intents and purposes, 'divorced' her whilst at the same time describing herself as part of the new breed of African women. Was it because she was afraid of betraying the course after rejecting her mother's choice of a husband and going ahead with her marriage to Modou, because she was a 'New African Woman', or was because of those inherent fears she hinted upon in the text? 

All through the narrative, explicit statements were made about the turning away from the old patriarchal society of the West African country (and West Africa in general) to one where everyone would have equal rights and access. And Ramatoulaye was one its proponents. She was politically-aware, a working mother, and a feminist revolution advocate, rejecting all suitors during and after he husband's funeral, including her Modou's elder brother. Yet, some of her decisions seemed to run counter to her preach. For instance, though she argued against the all-male National Assembly she would not enter politics. But most importantly, it was her stated reasons for not divorcing her husband which are difficult to accept:

Leave? Start again at zero, after living twenty-five years with one man, after having borne twelve children? Did I have enough energy to bar alone the weight of responsibility, which was both moral and material? [41]

And as a show of solidarity with Aissatou, she says:

Even though I understand your stand, even though I respect the choice of liberated women, I have never conceived happiness outside marriage. [58]

Yet, Ramatoulaye brought up her children liberally; making them choose their own husbands and throwing some part of her people's culture - both behavioural and institutional - away and setting her children up for the consequences of her decisions. Daba, the first child and former best friend of her father's new bride, was to build upon her mother's legacy. Her vision of marriage was totally different from that of her mother. She saw marriage as a

[M]utual agreement over a life's programme. So if one of the partners is no longer satisfied with the union, why should he remain? ... The wife can take the initiative to make the break. [77]

Whilst Daba was absorbing her mother's experiences and training and turning them into her own life philosophies, her other sisters were trailing other paths. Even then, Ramatoulaye would not resort to the 'normal' modes of correction. Especially when Aissatou (not the recipient of the letter) got pregnant she accepted the man responsible instead of reprimanding her, as suggested by her neighbour. Her focus to stay the course was once again threatened when she caught her twin daughters smoking in their room, after she had decided not to invade their privacy. And for those Western culture she did not agree with (such as the kind of fashion that was in vogue at the time), she was made to accept them, so that in someway her evolution was aided  by her children:

I considered the wearing of trousers dreadful in view of our build, which is not that of slim Western women. Trousers accentuate the ample figure of the black woman and further emphasize the curve of the small of the back. But I gave in to the rush towards this fashion, which constricted and hampered instead of liberating. [80]

Was the use of 'constricted' four words away from 'liberating' - and in the same descriptive sentence - symbolical? Could this be interpreted as a warning against absolute cultural osmosis instead of selective cultural borrowing? 

Another point of note is that even though the women in Mariama Bâ's story were Muslims they were all against polygamy. Regarding Ramatoulaye, one finds it difficult if it was the second marriage that made her bitter or her husband's treatment. In all three scenarios of polygamy (Ramatoulaye and Modou; Aissatou and Mawdo; and Jacqueline and Samba Diack) the husband's treatment of the first wives, after taking on another wife, was appalling resulting in emotional distress, divorce and nervous breakdown and subsequent death, respectively, for all the women involved.

Using climatic and geological metaphors that rings of 'tropical storms' and 'earthquake' respectively, Ramatoulaye provided a fitting end to her final transformation when she confirmed that she is not

[I]ndifferent to the irreversible currents of women's liberation that are lashing the world. This commotion that is shaking up every aspect of our lives reveals and illustrates our abilities. [93]

empahsising again the equality between the two genders. This statement defines or summarises all the major issues Ramatoulaye discussed in her letter.

Finally, like most stories written from the first person perspective, there were several events that she definitely couldn't have known had she not been told by another but no such claims were made. Again I find the description of another character's emotion by a protagonist in a 'first-person' narrative very difficult to believe, if not handled properly. However, all in all this was an interesting story and one I enjoyed reading.
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Brief Bio:  Mariama Bâ (1929–1981) was born into a well-to-do family in Dakar, where she grew up. In the newly independent Senegal, Bâ's father became one of the first ministers of state. After Bâ's mother died, she was raised in the traditional manner by her maternal grandparents. Her early education she received in French, while at the same time attending Koranic school. At school Bâ was a prominent student. During the colonial period and later, girls faced a number of obstacles when they wanted to have a higher education. Bâ's grandparents did not plan to educate her beyond primary school, but her father's insistence on giving her an opportunity to continue her studies eventually prevailed. She won the first prize in the entrance examination and entered the Ecole Normale de Rufisque, a teacher training college near Dakar. During this period she published her first book. It was non-fiction and dealt with colonial education in Senegal. At school she also wrote an essay, which created a stir for its rejection of French policies in Africa. However, later in life Bâ recalled her experience with the French colonial educational system in a positive way. Bâ married a Senegalese member of Parliament, Obèye Diop, but divorced him and was left to care for their nine children. (Source)
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*The last book read in 2011

110. Death and the King's Horseman by Wole Soyinka

Title: Death and the King's Horseman

Author: Wole Soyinka

Genre: Play/Tragedy

Publishers: Spectrum Books Limited

Pages: 77

Year of First Publication: 1975

Country: Nigeria

For  Amy's Nigeria Independence Day Reading/Reviewing Project and for the Top 100 Books Reading Challenge.

Death and the King's Horseman is one of Soyinka's best known plays. Voted as one of Africa's Best Books of the Twentieth Century, it has been more admired than it has been performed, according to a 2009 Guardian article. This play, according to the Author's Note, 'is based on real events which took place in Oyo, ancient Yoruba city of Nigeria, in 1946', though certain changes have been made in 'matters of detail, sequence and ... characterisation [and the setting taking back] two or three years... for minor reasons of dramaturgy.' An important note, before present readers make the same mistake, sounded by the author was that this work should not been seen as a 'clash of cultures', which is 'a prejudicial label which, quite apart from its frequent misapplication, presupposes a potential equality in every given situation of the alien culture and the indigenous, on the actual soil of the latter.'

The Elesin Oba, the King's Horseman, by tradition, has to follow the King, upon the latter's death, to the afterlife. And this must be done willingly and at a particular time, using the moon as a guide. Failure on the part of the Elesin Oba to follow the King would spell utter disgrace and shame for him and his family and upon his death is bound to live a degraded life in the hereafter. Meanwhile for the larger community, Elesin Oba's failure means showers of catastrophic events perpetrated by the King's spirit, which unable to cross into the afterlife, would wander amongst the people, torment them and cause cosmic disorder. 

Death and the King's Horseman begins with the Elesin Oba, amidst drumming and dancing, walking through the market, on expensive clothes of damask and alari spread on the ground by the market women, as he prepares to leave the earth after the death of the King. The Elesin Oba has come to understand the meaning of this step and has willingly accepted his fate. He knows that greater is his reward if this deed of ritual suicide is carried through. His praise-singer eggs him on, reminding him through metaphors, fables, and riddles, the reward of this step and why it must be done.  The Elesin Oba, as a final request and perhaps a fortuitous gratification one, on seeing a young woman walked into a market stall, asks the girl be given to him. But because 'only the curses of the departed are to be feared. [And] [t]he claims of one whose foot is on the threshold of their abode surpasses even the claims of blood [for which] It is impiety even to place hindrances in their ways', Iyaloja granted the Elesin Oba his final wish, even though the girl is betrothed to her son. However, before handing her over to the Elesin Iyaloja warns him

The living must eat and drink. When the moment comes, don't turn the food to rodents' droppings in their mouth. Don't let them taste the ashes of the world when they step out at dawn to breathe the morning dew.

IYALOJA: You wish to travel light. Well, the earth is yours. But be sure the seed you leave in it attracts no curse.

And to these the Elesin expresses shock at how the 'Mother of the Market' 'mistake [his] person. And that when he is gone they should let 'the fingers of [his] bride seal [his] eyelids with earth and wash [his] body'. 

The news of the ritual suicide reached the British Colonial District Officer, Simon Pilkings, who sent his men to arrest the Elesin, deeming the act as barbaric and counter to the law. Thus, the Elesin who had promised the women that nothing would hold him back when the time comes found himself in custody at the DO's house where his wish could not be fulfilled. Iyloja blamed the Elesin Oba, for loving the earth too much, and Pilkings, for misunderstanding the traditions of the people. Iyaloja to Elesin:

You have betrayed us. We fed your sweetmeats such as we hoped awaited you on the other side. But you said No, I must eat the world's left-overs. We said you were the hunter who brought the quarry down; to you belonged the vital portions of the game. No, you said, I am the hunter's dog and I shall eat the entrails of the game and the faeces of the hunter.... IYALOJA: We called you leader and oh, how you led us on. What we have no intention of eating should not be held to the nose.

To District Officer Pilkings, Iyaloja says

Child, I have not come to help your understanding. (Points to ELESIN) This is the man whose weakened understanding holds us in bondage to you. ... 

Elesin's son who had come home, from his study abroad, to bury his father when he heard of the King's demise 'proved the father..'. To avoid the shame of the father and avert any calamity that would befall the people as a results of his fatehr's failure to perform the ritual, Olunde took his father's place and committed ritual suicide. The King's body with Olunde, the son who became the father, was brought to Elesin for a final ritual to be performed; however, seeing his son by the King, Elesin also committed suicide. But Elesin's death has become useless and 'his son will feast on the meat and throw him bones.' Refusing to go at his appointed time he is bound to live a lowlife in the afterlife.

All through the texts the reader discovers that whereas the people and Elesin understood the essence of what he has to do, Simon and Jane Pilkings did not. For instance, Olunde argued that it is not different from the war being waged by the British and that their greatest art 'is the art of survival.' Yet they have not the humility to let other's survive. Shocked Jane asked 'through ritual suicide?' and Olunde responded:

Is that worse than mass suicide? Mrs Pilkings, what do you call what those young men sent to do by their generals in this war? Of course you have also mastered the art of calling things by names which don't remotely describe them. ...

OLUNDE: Mrs Pilkings, whatever we do, never suggest that a thing is the opposite of what it really is. In your newsreel I heard defeats, thorough, murderous defeats described as strategic victories. No wait, it wasn't just on your newsreels. Don't forget I was attached to hospitals all the time. Hordes of your wounded passed through these wards. I spoke to them. I spent evenings by their bedside while they spoke terrible truths of the realities of that war. I know now how history is made.

Through the arguments between Olunde and Jane Pilkings and between Iyaloja and Simon Pilkings, Soyinka showed how much similarity exists between these two cultures and their attendant religions. It is all a matter of how you look at it and from where you stand when looking.

Soyinka's plays are often times difficult to explain, for though on the surface they may seem easy to grasp, beneath them would be simmering something powerful. Thus, I would recommend that, if possible, one reads this piece himself/herself.

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Brief Bio: Read about the author and his body of works here.

ImageNations Rating: 6.0/6.0

85. The Gods are not to Blame by Ola Rotimi

Title: The Gods are not to Blame

Author: Ola Rotimi

Genre: Play/Tragedy

Publishers: University Press PLC

Pages: 72

Year of First Performance: 1968

Place of First Performance: Ife Festival of Arts, Nigeria

Year of First Publication: 1971 (this edition, 1990)

Country: Nigeria

In this play, Sophocle's Oedipus Rex, is given a Nigerian treatment and having not read Sophocle's, I really enjoyed Ola Rotimi's rendition. The gods are not to blame is a play that questions destiny: are we in control of our destiny or we are the product of our destiny? Can we escape it? At the end of the play, the question is still not answered as an individual can argue both for or against this theme.

The play opens with someone narrating the events surrounding the birth of King Adetusa's first son. Queen Ojuola, King Adetusa's wife, has just delivered her first son and the soothsayer has been summoned to foretell the future of this newly born son. The soothsayer, Baba Fakunle, announced that:

This boy, he will kill his own father and then marry his own mother!

To avert this taboo from materialising, the baby was sent to the evil grove and offered as a sacrifice to the gods. 

The first Scene of the first Act opens thirty-two after, when King Adetusa has been succeeded by King Odewale after a series of battles and conflicts with neighbouring villages and Kutuje has become somewhat peaceful but for the sudden deaths and sicknesses that have befallen the people of Kutuje. Having nowhere to go and not knowing what to do, the people brought their grievances, their problems, to bear before King Odewale. 

Yesterday, my twins died - both of them. My third child ... [unstrapping the baby on her back.] here, feel her, feel how hot she is ... come feel.

However, since the King himself has not been spared the sickness because 'sickness like rain falls on every roof', he has sent Aderopo to the oracle of Ifa at the shrine of Orunmila to seek the cause of their tribulations. Returning home, Aderopo - fearful for the results he was carrying - decided to tell the chief, in private, the response the oracle has given him. Haughty and temperamental as he is, King Odewale demanded to receive the information right in front of his people, to the hearing of everyone, mocking Aderopo in the process. After several cajoling, mocking, insulting, and pleading, Aderopo told them what the oracle had said:

Very well. Ifa oracle says the curse, your highness, is on a man...

A full-grown man...

The man has killed another man...

King Adetusa - my own father, the King who ruled this land before you....

 Having been told this, King Odewale set out how the murderer would be punished

Before Ogun the god of Iron, I stand on oath. Witness now all you present that before the feast of Ogun, which starts at sunrise, I, Odewale, the son of Ogundele, shall search and fully lay open before your very eyes the murderer of King Adetusa. And having seized that murderer, I swear by this sacred arm of Ogun, that I shall straightway bring him to the agony of death. First he shall be exposed to the eyes of the world and put to shame - the beginning of living death. Next, he shall be put into lasting darkness, his eyes tortured in their living sockets until their blood and rheum swell forth to fill the hollow of crushed eyeballs. And then, final agony: we shall cut him from his roots. Expelled from this land of his birth, he shall roam in darkness in the land of nowhere, and there die unmourned by men who know him, and buried by vultures who know him not... (Page 24)

Thus, like biblical David, King Odewale narrated his punishment even before the culprit was found and he did so, in anger and arrogance, swearing before the townspeople and the gods they serve. Baba Fakunle was called forth to deconstruct the message he gave to Aderopo. Approaching the palace, Baba Fakunle, the soothsayer, refused to move farther claiming 

... I smelled the truth as I came to this land. The truth smelled stronger and stronger as I came into this place. Now it is choking me...choking me. I say. Boy! Lead on home away from here.(26/27)

Again, the anger and arrogance of King Odewale would not allow the soothsayer depart to his village until the truth is squeezed out of him. Several verbal struggles ensued with attempts of morphing into physical persuasions until the soothsayer blurted it out:

The truth that you are the cursed murderer that you seek.

King Odewale took this as an insult even as the soothsayer went on to call him a 'bedsharer'. Before Baba Fakunle finally departed he told King Odewale that it was his 'hot temper, like a disease from birth, .... that has brought you trouble' and that

King Odewale, King of Kutuje, go sit in private and think deep before darkness covers you up ... think ... think ... think!

Instead the King saw this as a plot to get him out of the land because he was an Ijekun man ruling the people of Kutuje. He accused Aderopo - son of King Adetusa - as behind this plot, together with some of the chiefs and his own bodyguards. Here the 'blindness' that mostly follow leaders came into play. As the play unfolds King Odewale made several statements - unconsciously though - that affirmed what Baba Fakunle had said, calling Aderopo, his brother and inviting him to also come and sleep with his mother. Again, like Macbeth, the King became almost demented began accusing everyone of plotting against him.

Then a series of events occurred. His best friend Alaka suddenly appeared in his palace in search of his long-lost friend. Through conversations, and again, through his quick temperament, Odewale nearly killed his friend when the issue of his birth came up, for Alaka had called him a bastard in front of the townspeople. Again, Alaka promised to tell Odewale how he came to be in Ijekun in private, but again Odewale refused, setting  the stage for the denouement.

Though Baba Fakunle linked King Odewale's 'hot temper' to his curse, was it really that? Or was it his attitude against insult and falsities? Or even his unbending attitude towards unfairness? I would prefer the last two and not the first.

The play could be interpreted in several ways. For instance, King Odewale's message to the people when they approached him for the solution to their problem is almost  like a social commentary on the political scene of Nigeria or most countries for that matter, or even on human nature. He asked them what they have done for themselves in order to mitigate the effect of the sickness instead of rushing to him. He says:

But what have you done about it, I ask. You there - Mama Ibeji - what id you do to save your twins from dying? ... each one of you lies down in his own small hut and does nothing. ... Well, let me tell you, brothers and sisters, the ruin of the land and its people begins in their homes. (Page 12)

This is a beautiful play and even though one could tell how it would end, it is how the events unfolded that makes it beautiful and worth the read. The adaptation of English by Nigerians and making it their own is clearly seen. Interspersed with proverbs the dialogues are natural and roll off the tongue leaving taste of satisfaction on the reader's tongue. It is recommended to all who love good plays. If you have never read a play, give this a try.

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Brief Bio: Emanuel Gladstone Olawale Rotimi (1938 – 2000) (AKA. Ola Rotimi) was born April 13th 1938, in Sapele, Nigeria, to Samuel Gladstone Enitan Rotimi and Dorcas Adolae Oruene Addo. Ola Rotimi became one of contemporary Africa's leading playwrights and theater directors. He obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Boston University, and the Master of Fine Arts from Yale, where he earned the distinction of being a Rockefeller Foundation scholar in Playwriting and Dramatic Literature. His graduate project-play was declared “Yale University's Student Play of the Year." 

His publications include six full-length plays (two of them award-winning), and a number of scholarly articles on Theater and Drama. He is featured in such reputable international records as: the Encyclopedia Britanica, the Encyclopedia of World Authors, Cambridge Guide to World Theater, and the International Authors and Writers Who's Who. (Source)

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Read my review of his Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again

71. A Question of Power by Bessie Head

Author: Bessie Head

Genre: Fiction

Publishers: Heinemann African Writers Series

Pages: 206

Year of Publication: 1974

Country: South Africa/Botswana

For the Top 100 Challenge and the Africa Reading Challenge

It seemed almost incidental that he was an African. So vast had his inner perceptions grown over the years that he preferred an identification with mankind to an identification with a particular environment. And yet, as an African, he seemed to have made one of the most perfect statements: 'I am just anyone.' (Page 11)

This is the statement that introduces us to the bizarre world of Bessie Head's A Question of Power. This novel runs parallel with the author's life and perhaps documents the tragic and traumatic life of one of Africa's unrequited and most ill-treated author: leaving South African on an exit visa with the clause of never to return, it took about fifteen of years of being stateless in Botswana before Bessie was granted citizenship. In this novel, however, Bessie tells of a woman, Elizabeth - whose circumstances (white mother and native black South African father) were akin to hers - as she journeys from her home country, South Africa, to Motabeng, a village in Botswana. Before young Elizabeth grew to make her own decisions, she was told by the head of the missionary, where she stayed during most of her infancy, that her mother went mad and she had better be careful else she would also go mad.

Your mother was insane. If you're not careful you'll get insane just like your mother. Your mother was a white woman. They had to lock her up, as she was having a baby by the stable boy who was a native.

And mad she became. A Question of Power relates to us the intricacies, workings and visions of Elizabeth's mind as she moved in and out of insanity, hospitals and mental homes. Divided into two parts, the first part deals with Sello and the second part Dan. Sello was both God and Satan and he haunted the dreams and thoughts of Elizabeth. Later, he started appearing with Medusa and Elizabeth considered him to be benign almost god-like. Sello holds discussion and even though Elizabeth hated him she grew to like him for he was the one who provided her with 'the lever out of hell'.

Unlike Sello, Dan did not hold conversations with death; he also understood the mechanics of power and it was this quality of Dan that made Elizabeth's description of Sello as been merciful and having prophet-like qualities precise, for Dan was out to kill Elizabeth. He haunted her, leading Elizabeth to the edge of suicide and a visit to a dilapidated mental home. It was only through the intervention of Sello that Elizabeth survived Dan's threats of suicide. Yet it was to Dan that Elizabeth was attracted in the beginning. And Dan has many sexual perversions.

This is an emotional piece similar in essence to the movie A Beautiful Mind that told the life story of the Nobel Laureate in Economics John Nash who was a schizophrenic. Elizabeth's story inspires. It shows how we should not give up; how we must battle with ourselves if we are the hinderance to our own progress and a threat to our own lives and this Elizabeth and Bessie did so successfully. At several points I find myself not knowing what the end would be. For instance, though from the initial pages I found that Elizabeth may not die, I still couldn't resist such thoughts. Who would save her in this desolate Motabeng village where almost all the inhabitants are R.2 away from poverty, if not dead poor?

Though the story describes the events before, during, and after Elizabeth's breakdown, describing the nitty-gritty of the mental illness: describing their hallucinations and telling their conversations so that sometimes it is almost impossible to distinguish between the real physical characters and those that project from Elizabeth's mind, most of the beautiful lines and those that are deeply conscious, and would get the reader thinking, are those written during her breakdown periods, when she saw 'things'. Elizabeth's discussion revolved around politics, religion, sexuality and humanity.

And throughout that whole year Medusa only replied in despicable terms, the wrong things were stressed. When someone says 'my people' with a specific stress on the blackness of those people, they are after kingdoms and permanently child-like slaves. 'The people' are never going to rise above the status of 'the people'. They are going to be told what is good for them by the 'mother' and the 'father'. And she made wrong kinds of attacks on Elizabeth. (Page 63)

Isn't this a foible of autocrats? Isn't this what all of them are seeking or exhibiting - the Ben Alis?, the Mubaraks?, nations (East? West?), institutions (IMF? World Bank?) It continues...

Sello, the monk, had proclaimed this very road in opposition to horrors - let people be free to evolve, let everything alone and re-create a new world of soft textures and undertones, full of wild flowers and birds and children's playtime and women baking bread. He kept on looking hopefully at Medusa. Oh no, she simply wanted to be the manager of the African continent with everyone she found disagreeable - OUT. (Page 64)

 In a conversation involving race, Elizabeth states that

The victim is really the most flexible, the most free person on earth. He doesn't have to think up endless laws and endless falsehoods. His jailer does that. His jailer creates the chains and the oppression. He is merely presented with it. He is presented with a thousand and one hells to live through, and he usually lives through them all. (Page 84)

Some commentators have stated that this novel could be read on two levels: an insider description of the mind of a suffering, delusional person and as an exploration of power relations and political-social evil. And on these two levels the reader leaves feeling satisfied.

To end this review, I quote the sentence that births this title:

If the things of the soul are really a question of power, then anyone in possession of power of the spirit could be Lucifer. (Page 199)

This is a brilliantly written novel about the nature of mental illness and the nature of oppression. It's almost like a transcription of A Beautiful Mind and more. If you ever loved that movie you would love this too. I enjoyed reading this though it took me a while, but I cannot blame the novel for it. Consequently, I would benefit from a second reading or re-reading of passages. This novel is on the list of the Top 100 African Books of the Twentieth Century. I highly recommend this to all lovers of literature especially to those who love to read something different or are adventurous in their readings.

Several of such beautiful lines and thoughts and aphorisms are found scattered throughout the novel. Last Friday I brought a whole list of quotes from this book after only 60 pages of reading. This Friday I bring you part 2 this novel.

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Click here to read Bessie's A Woman Alone and her brief biography. A Woman Alone is her autobiography; it takes snapshots at several moments of her life including the writing of this novel.

ImageNations: 5.5 out of 6.0