Representation of Africa in Post-colonial Anglophone Writings:

V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe and J. M. Coetzee

Md. Shafiul Alam Khan Chowdhury

Student ID: 11163008

Department of English and Humanities

April 2014

BRAC University
66, Mohakhali C/A, Dhaka 1212.

Representation of Africa in Post-colonial Anglophone Writings:

V. S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe and J. M. Coetzee

A Thesis Submitted to

The Department of English and Humanities

of BRAC University
by

Md. Shafiul Alam Khan Chowdhury

ID: 11163008

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for The Degree of
MA in English

April 2014

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

At first, I would like to offer my deep gratitude to my thesis supervisor Professor Firdous Azim
for giving me her valuable time and patience. She corrected my uncountable mistakes as well as
guided me throughout my thesis work. I would also like to express thanks to Professor Syed
Manzoorul Islam for making me understand the phenomenon of post-modernity in literature. I
am grateful to Sonika, Anika and Parvez for their assistance in writing my thesis. Lastly, I am
grateful to my parents who have always encouraged me to complete my paper successfully.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract

-----------------------------------------------------------

Introduction-----------------------------------------------------------

Chapter One:
Thesis: Orientalism ------------------------------------------------------

Chapter Two:
Antithesis: Resistance---------------------------------------------------

39

Chapter Three:
Synthesis: Renunciation--------------------------------------------------

61

Conclusion------------------------------------------------------------- 81

Bibliography---------------------------------------------------------- 82

Chowdhury 1

ABSTRACT
Post-colonialism and post-modernism are literary movements that can be viewed together. In this
context post-colonial Anglo-phone literature about Africa is written from different points of view
by post-colonial writers like Chinua Achebe, V. S. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee. All of them
represent Africa as a hybrid and complex society. Their treatment of Africa is different from
each other. Naipaul carries on traditional orientalist discourse while Achebe propagates a counter
discourse in representing Africa. In both writers periphery becomes the focus of their
representation; however they portray different concepts of Africa. J. M. Coetzee opens a new
face of representation where he blends post-colonial phenomena with the techniques of postmodern writing. He renounces the authorial point of view to empower the language of narrative,
showing that language is autonomous and rather than using it as a means to establish any
particular ideology, it is interpreted by the reader to resolve the question of interpretation.

Chowdhury 2

INTRODUCTION

The moment I realized in reading Heart of Darkness that I was not supposed to be part of
Marlows crew sailing down the Congo to a bend in the river, but I was one of those on the
shore, jumping and clapping and making faces so on, then I realized that was not me, and
that that story had to be told again.
Chinua Achebe in an interview (1989)

Representations of Africa are ambiguous and ambivalent in the writings of post-colonial

writers. Chinua Achebe, V. S. Naipaul and J. M. Coetzee are the most renowned of the writers as
they are most vibrant in their depiction of post-colonial identity, hegemony, racism, violence and
resistance. Instead of concentrating on the hybrid nature of post-colonial African identity Achebe
shows Africa as a universe that has its own tradition with a unique way of life. On the other
hand, racism, violence and the problematics of African identity are the most discussed issues in
Coetzees narratives. Moreover, Naipaul in his fiction and travel writings examines Africanism
from the point of view of an outsider. Representations of African identity by this triad reflects
many dimensions of the cultural, social, and psychological phenomena of Africa in the emerging
era of post-coloniality.
In What is Literature?(1947) Jean Paul Sartre argues that language is used in literature as
a tool not only for clear meaning, but also to portray the world from a certain political view
point. In the same line, Roland Barthes claims that the structure of writing is created under a
historic reality with political implications. In further discussions of his theoretical approaches,
Barthes deals with the problem of meaning, asserting that there are usually two ways of
writings; one to deconstruct the trend of history by re-writing the history of a certain territory and

Chowdhury 3

two, to follow the path of his or her ancestors by continuing the trend of writings which support
and elaborate it and as a result becoming a part of a grand narrative. Barthes explains that writers
self-consciously produce meaning through their writings (Contemporary Critical Theorist,
Roland Barthes 70). He points out that language either prolongs the bourgeois ordering of the
world of meaning, or can develop a self-conscious engagement with that world. In this way, a
writer questions and reorders existing discourse by weakening existing bourgeois ideological
hegemony. This identification of two ways of writing is described by Barthes, in S/Z (1970) and
The Pleasure of the Text (1973) (70). Following this line of thought, we observe that Naipaul
represents the first category of writing whereas Chinua Achebes initiative is to question the
bourgeois ideological hegemony. As in Orientalist approach where African people and tradition
are represented as Other by Joseph Conrad, Naipaul can be categorized as a traditional writer
who strengthens the bourgeois tradition of discourse. On the other hand, Achebes approach
towards literature is, to quote Culler, to problematise the meanings [of] our cultural codes
otherwise confer, and thus to unwrite the world as it is written by prior discursive parties (7071). In post-colonial discourse, the meaning of narrative, is dependent on the position of writing,
and as structural theorist Ronald Barthes argues meaning is not decided by material reality, but
by positions in systems of discourse (73). Now, if we have to diagnose meanings of the
discourses attempted by the two writers we have to find out Achebes and Naipauls position in
post-colonial discourse which will ultimately answer the debate on representation in the postcolonial world. Though, Achebe and Naipaul have their unique ways of representing Africa, their
political goals are clear. Achebe represents Africa from a native point of view; on the other hand,
Naipaul is self-consciously strengthening and extending the pre-established myths of
Orientalism. Both Anglo-phone writers neither of whom can allow delight English as their

Chowdhury 4

mother tongue. If we investigate we will observe that African culture and history or established
tradition in African languages was totally absent in English writing. As a result, Achebe is an
intruder in this field. In our discussion, we will see how Achebe has succeeded in establishing a
new discourse by representing the Other in a manner in which the Other becomes the Subject.
Anglophone writers often use opposing discourses to create meaning which are
ambiguous and double-edged. Therefore, the process of deconstructing the writing is the most
important feature in post-structuralist and deconstructulalist criticism. Claude Levi-Strauss had
defined language as as a system of sign and linguistics as a branch of semiotics (1273). This
has been used by post-structuralism to show that every structure is oppressive and when
language is used as structure to create an ideology it can be oppressive too. As a result, poststructuralists and post-modernists, rather than using language as a tool of establishing an
ideology, try to detach a writer from his or her writings. In this way, language becomes
autonomous. This is why; meaning is created by readers and is removed from its structure. That
is why Barthes empowers readers by calling it reading-as-rewriting as the reader participates in
the critical dialogue. This is best encapsulated in the theory of the The Death of the Author
(74). J. M. Coetzees Foe provides a good example of this. The use of metafictionality questions
the authenticity of the narrator. Meta-fictionality and inter-textuality enable post-colonial writing
to explore the ambiguity of meaning and identity. Coetzee mingles post-colonial and postmodern techniques of writing to explore the conflict between an authorial and readers point of
view. It stresses on the intentional silencing of voices by Western canonical writers and
questions the authenticity of Western discourse. Elements of metafictionality in Foe (1986);
question previously established trend of meaning in Robinson Crusoe (1724). However, the text
does not try to establish a Truth. The novel contains three stands distinctly represented by the

Chowdhury 5

writer, reader and observers (critic) which construct a variety of meanings. The metafictional
element in the novel intertextualises Robinson Crusoe to deconstruct its myth and also to
empower readers by giving other possibilities to the story. Coetzees other renowned work,
named Disgrace (1999) depicts post-apartheid South Africa. It helps the reader to see the altered
picture of colonialism where subject positions have been altered due to change in politics and
power positions. However racism has its claws all over South Africa. It is important to note that
the first part of the novel echoes Fanons idea of the Black inferiority complex as expressed by a
student who unconsciously submits herself to her unconscious desires only to revolt against them
later on. The novel depicts the psychological metamorphosis of both the races in a new emerging
historical context. That is not simply hybridity or mimicry. It is rather a conflict of suppression,
hate, resistance and misunderstanding. In representations of Africa, the text does not simply
confine itself to the realm of representation and re-representation. It deals with problems of
language or of the limits of language. As Andy Stafford and Susan McManus say For Barthes,
the interplay of theorizing and writing means renouncing the drive to an authoritative and allencompassing metalanguage and, in turn, this leaves us with the multiplication of spaces of
theorizing and writing (81). This applies to the representation of South Africa in J. M Coetzees
novel.
In the first chapter, V. S. Naipauls non-fiction The Masque of Africa (2010) and fiction A
Bend in the River (1979) are together explored to see the traces of orientalist representation of
Africa in these writings. As a master of post-colonial writings, Naipaul encapsulates the
phenomenon of post-coloniality in both his fictional and non-fictional writings. In his
representation of post-colonial Africa, the continent is often portrayed as a land of failure.
However, in his fictional character such as in Salim we observe an alienated personality with a

Chowdhury 6

feeling of insecurity and restlessness in search of a personal space. He becomes a mimic man
who struggles to cope with his environment. He neither identifies with Africa or India, nor with
Europe. Naipauls protagonist is a post-colonial psychological phenomenon. However,
interestingly in the representations of Africa in Naipauls writings, we observe Subject and
Object dichotomy where Africa is represented as Other.
In Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) Chinua Achebe (1930-2013)
brings Africa to the centre from the periphery by penetrating into African identity. He challenges
the previous discourses saying that it represented Africa from an outsider point of view. Here,
Africa becomes Achebes subject with a notion of self-criticism as well as a criticism of earlier
discourse about Africa. Africa is not a territory without civilization and tradition; rather it is a
continent of prehistoric traces that differs from western civilization. It is not a static civilization;
rather it changes under the influence of colonial rule. Whether this change is good or evil is
questionable but Achebe has successfully participated in the post-colonial trend of writing back
to the centre.
Finally in the representation of Africa, J. M. Coetzee rejects conventional idea of writing
from an authorial point of view; rather he denounces any subject position to give the discourse
totally an autonomous identity. In Foe (1986) the author combines the techniques of postmodernism and post-colonialism to explain a conflict of representation. He empowers the reader
as well as the language instead of giving the writer the full authority over the discourse. In a
further attempt, he gives an example of a changed subject position in Disgrace (1999). As this
binary position of dominant and dominated is a timeless phenomenon, Coetzee stresses on the
point that in a discourse one writer can propagate a particular subject position, if he or she cannot
renounce his or her authorial point of view by giving the language an autonomous identity.

Chowdhury 7

CHAPTER ONE
THESIS: ORIENTALISM
I had to go to the documents in the British Museum and elsewhere, to get the true feel of the
history of the colony.- Nobel Lecture by V. S. Naipaul (2001)
V. S. Naipauls confession of acquiring knowledge about colonialism from the British
Museum illustrates his understanding of history. We can easily connect his way of representation
with Edward Saids famous book Orientalism. Naipauls preconception is shaped by the
discourse established by the Occident writers, mainly travel writers or religious preachers. No
doubt his simple assertion will help us to understand his position in representing Africa through
using of Saids theory of Orientalism. Instead of being a successful writer in representing an
ambiguous African identity consisting of the characteristics of hybridity, hegemony,
homelessness, alienation, anxiety and mimicry, we see him as a propagator of Orientalism due to
his depiction of African civilization as an embodiment of failure.
Naipaul is often a target of post-colonial critics who accuse him of being cynical of
worlds Other than the European. Corruption, disorder and violence are also clearly depicted by
Chinua Achebe in his essay named The Trouble with Nigeria. This particular essay describes
the true picture of Nigeria: corruption, problem of tribalism, the unpatriotic nature of Nigerian
people as well as the immaturity and dishonesty of the countrys politicians. Moreover, Achebe
depicted the problem and possibilities of the Igbo clan in this particular essay. The impression of
a reader after reading the essay will not be different from that of Naipauls writing about Africa,
often, the picture is even worse. However, the accusation against Naipaul is that he represents
African people as if they are solely responsible for their downtrodden condition. Naipauls

Chowdhury 8

representation follows the line of Orientalists like Conrad. He confesses at the very beginning of
his travel book The Masque of Africa (2010):
I would drive the fifteen or so miles to Entebbe, where the airport was and where, on
the lake in Africa, there was also (as there was in other British colonial towns) a botanical
garden, pleasant to walk in. Sometimes (a reminder of the wilderness by which we were
surrounded, but from which we were protected) the ground of the garden was flooded in
parts by water from the Lake seeping through. (Naipaul Masque 2)
The writer is in a botanical garden, a colonial enterprise which gives a flavor of wilderness,
while keeping him safe from the actual wilderness of Africa, as we observe in Conrads Heart of
Darkness: . . . the wilderness . . . seemed to draw him to its pitiless breast by the awakening of
forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions . . . this alone
had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations (Conrad 112). This
is the beginning of the African journey for both Conrad and for Naipaul. Naipaul begins his
narrative by giving a hint of a difference between colonial wilderness and African natural
wilderness, and that the wilderness of Africa is not safe but had been tamed by colonizers.
Moreover, Naipaul, is a self-proclaimed descendent of Conrad, as he declares his
admiration for Joseph Conrad in one of his Interviews: "Conrad's value to me is that he is
someone who, 60 to 70 years ago, meditated on my world, a world I recognize today. I feel this
about no other writer of the century . . ." (Conversation with V. S. Naipaul, 9). In the same
interview, he adds:
It is remarkable that Conrad could look at that world with the utmost seriousness. What
an achievement! Can you imagine the pressure not to see it? Asiatics are people that
simply didn't exist as individuals. In the novel of the 19th century they are just
background, never more. Well, what a wonderful thing to do, to study the difference
between two different kinds of people. With Conrad you have a great effort of
understanding, of sympathy - do you feel that? (A Conversation with V. S. Naipaul, 10)

Chowdhury 9

Conrad has also been reinterpreted by Chinua Achebe in his essay An Image of Africa: Racism
in Conrads Heart of Darkness where he says: Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa
as the other world, the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where mans
vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality (1614). When
Joseph Conrad becomes one of the guides for our travel writer, we are led naturally to references
of Western historiographers and travel writers, such as Stanley and Speke in The Masque of
Africa. References from Speke abound while describing Mutesa, the wide eyed son of Sunna,
who is shown to be as cruel as his father; a powerful king of pre-colonial Africa. Speke admires
the civilization of Mutesa, and declares that that civilization has been destroyed by the Arabs.
Naipaul also refers to Henry Morton Stanley who is a British journalist as shown in A History of
Africa: African societies and the establishment of colonial rule, 1800-1951 (2006), and describes
him as an enthusiast about spreading Christianity in Africa. He has jotted down his experience of
travelling in Through the Dark Continent (2012), similarly to Joseph Conrads Heart of
Darkness, where the narrator is looking for Mr. Kurtz. This reminds us of the symbol of darkness
that connects the two authors Stanley and Conrad. The inter-textuality is obvious, though there is
no proof that Conrad was influenced by Stanley. However, it shares a trend of thought which had
successfully been developed in the discourse of Orientalism.
In The Masque of Africa, V. S. Naipaul wishes to reach at Africas beginning of things.
This is an effort to discover the root of African beliefs. The inner meanings of African ways are
discovered through a discussion of the religions, mythical histories and cults through European
travel writers. Most interestingly, the narrator says that he is going to be neutral about African
customs. However, his method of representation draws a line between good and evil which tends
to show the rituals of African belief as obscure even to its own people. This is because Africans

Chowdhury 10

do not have a written history; only some documents by some western travelers which are
followed by Naipaul as main sources of African history. However, it is important to remember
that though Naipaul tries to search the beginning of African beliefs, he actually depends on
some documents from the very recent past. Also African oral tradition is discarded as a resource.
Here, we have to remember that while western civilization is established on written documents,
African civilization is rooted in its oral tradition. But according to Naipaul Africa cannot be
discovered without the help of earlier white travelers.
Naipaul starts his travel in Uganda, then proceeds to Ghana, Nigeria and Gabon; finally
ending in South Africa. His journey in Uganda started with a visit to the sacred place of Mutesa
described in the chapter The Tomb at Kasubi. This is where the past is examined with help
from John Hanning Speke; Naipaul is explaining African tradition with information derived from
Speke:
Mutesa was only twenty-five, almost as cruel as his father, but at the same time outwardlooking, a man of intuition and intelligence. He liked the guns he got from Speke; he
liked the compass and other instruments he saw Speke using. . . But Mutesas Baganda
people, with their gift for social organization, their military discipline, and their elaborate
court ritual, evolved over some centuries, has a civilization of their own. They built roads
as straight as Roman roads; he said the Arabs were liars; and thirteen years later,
when he met the explorer H. M. Stanley, he asked his help in getting English missionaries
to come to Uganda. (Naipaul Masque 4-6)
Mutesa is good and less cruel than his father as described by the western traveler as he
seeks help from the English as well as being generous to Christian missions. The
acknowledgement of an African civilization is also interesting. However, the reason of this
acknowledgement becomes clear when Speke says that Africa had its own civilization once, but
they had lost it to the Arab invaders, and eventually regained it with the help of Europeans. It
serves two purposes: first, Arabs are held responsible for the destruction of African civilization

Chowdhury 11

and finally, only Europeans can bring back their civilization with the blessings of Christianity.
Speke did not acknowledge the injustice of British or European colonial rule over Africa, and
does not think that colonial rule is bad. He makes fun of the Arab traders in Africa: . . . . The
Kabala Sunna, known for his great cruelty, had welcomed the Arabs. He liked their toys. He
especially liked the mirrors; he had never seen his face before, and couldnt get over it (Naipaul
Masque, 4-5).
Unlike Mutesa, his father Sunna is shown as cruel as he had accepted Arab traders and
their gifts. Islam and Arabs are represented as outsiders to Africa as an occupation force as well
as colonizers and destroyers of African culture and traditions. Though Christianity and Whites
are no different to Arabs as colonizers; they are represented as a peace-bearers, educators as well
as saviors of African history. Naipauls narrative tries to justify British rule by asserting that
Africa had its own tradition or history before the Arab invasion. British rule had reincarnated the
lost civilization of Africa. This justifies British rule in Uganda. Europeans have given African
people the light of education, restored what Arab rule had destroyed. Speke did not consider
Arab and British rule from the same point of view. He sees one as destructive, the other as
constructive, instead of calling them both outsiders. This type of justification was also common
in Asia. For example, Amitav Ghosh in The Glass Palace (2000) and The Sea of Poppies (2008)
shows how the British justify their rule over the region in the name of freedom to the local
people from the cruelty of local kings or zamindars. They claimed that the local bourgeoisie were
brutally oppressing the people and as a result they had to establish rule of law in the regions by
defeating the local elite. This is the justification for European invasion of others lands.
The current political situation is shown as chaotic in The Masque of Africa. Bloodshed
and tribal wars have devastated Uganda. The representation of Africa as a land of violence is

Chowdhury 12

echoed in A Bend in the River (1979). The depiction of tribal wars, bloodshed and corruption are
described as a natural African phenomenon:
..; and you understood that what was once bush in an unimportant area of a small
colony had become valuable building land. The shiny new corrugated-iron roofs gave
you the feelings that in spite of the bad recent past, forty years of bad as anything in
Africa murderous tyranny followed by war and little wars there might be a money
frenzy down there now. (Naipaul Masque 2) [My Italics]
The leaders of Africa are seen as brutal, criminal and corrupt and autocratic. The big man in A
Bend in the River is no different from Idi Amin. However, Africa is a land that has a gifted
leader like Nelson Mandela as well. The long period of repressive colonial rule in Africa is
completely ignored. In keeping with Saids understanding of how non-European civilizations are
Othered in Orientalist discourse, Naipaul focuses on the exotic life of a castrated drum bearer in
The Masque of Africa. Moreover, to stress his point he brings a descendent of a drum-beater who
confesses that he is not actually castrated: . . .He added that the kabakas drum-beaters had to be
castrated, since they were always about the Kabaka and were likely to gaze on the Kabakas
women. This was said more to thrill us than anything else. He himself was not castrated
(Naipaul Masque 11). The representation shows the contradictions between myth and reality.
What had been already established by the earlier discourse is different from what is happening;
showing a duality in Naipauls writings. The myth was that beaters were castrated, but the reality
reveals the falseness of the myth.
Similarly, human sacrifice is described by Naipauls predecessors. Naipaul repeats this
by referencing a presenter in popular media. Popular media, as we know, is another form of
spreading the messages of neo-colonization. Popular media tries to abolish cultural diversity by
trying to establish western cultural influences and is backed by western capitalist corporations.
As my paper is trying to draw a connection between the existing orientalist trends it will not be

Chowdhury 13

wrong to say that popular media is another version of orientalist trends. That Naipaul takes a
representation from this media as a source to carry on traditional allegations against African
cannibalism is significant: Some days later I was looking at a magazine program.. The
woman presenter saidwith a degree of ease, like someone only stating a fact about the
monumentthat nine men had been sacrificed at the time of the building (Naipaul Masque 14).
Then the text refers to the past with the help of a narrator named Prince Kassim: But later,
when I heard from Prince Kassim, Mutesas Muslim descendant, that in old days human sacrifice
was a common practice when they put up the pillars or laid the foundations of a tomb,
(Naipaul Masque 15). As mentioned earlier, Naipaul constantly uses western sources. Reference
of Speke is frequent in the first part of Naipauls book: When Speke went to Uganda in 1861
Mutesa was Kabaka, exercising a most despotic kind of power in his court, killing people like
fowls (as a visitor said); .. (Naipaul Masque 15). The techniques of intertextuality prove
Naipaul to be a part of the Oriental discourse established by Western writers. Narrative
techniques are important to understand the meaning in discourse. Traces of earlier Western
writers are evident in Naipauls writing.
Orientals are cruel. Naipaul proves this by inserting the cruel story of burning the
Mutesas brothers by his mother as an epilogue or night time story of a witch. Elements of fairy
tales can be observed everywhere in this part. It is narrated as a mother or grandmother telling a
bedtime story to thrill their child or grandchild: Unless you knew what was going to happen
you might miss the drama in Spekes pages.. (Naipaul Masque 17). Speke had mentioned
only once that during a music-playing session half the brothers were manacled. Naipaul uses
these references to make a good story:

Chowdhury 14

There was another piece of the coronation preparation that Speke witnessed. The woman
who cut Mutesas umbilical cord was now a figure of honor in the court. . . . Speke,
walking in the neighborhood of Mutesas palace one day, came across Sunnas palace.
The bush begins to seem ordinary: no romance, no history, seems possible in that wet red
earth. (Naipaul Masque 18-20)
As Africa does not contain any records of history; a history of Africa can only be gathered from
books by early Western travelers.
Stanley says that Sunna was born in 1820, became Kabala in 1836. He was dead when
Speke came to Uganda in 1861-2, and Speke, a geographer above everything else, writes
about him only tangentially. For living details of Sunna you have to turn to Stanley,
though he came to Uganda many years later, in 1875, during his east-to-west crossing of
the continent. Many people were still alive then who knew the terrible Sunna, and
Stanley, with the Newspapermans relish for a good story, got them to talk. (Naipaul
Masque 22) [My italics]
Naipaul relies on Speke for a reference to African history even though Speke is a geographer and
wrote only tangentially about the kabala. Stanley was a journalist, and good stories and true
stories were demanded by the newspapers. It shows that Naipauls two sources have no
credibility and most of the stories about Sunna are about cruelty, revenge, injustice and abuse of
power. The killing of the people of Busoga is described in detail to show how brutally Sunna
used to take revenge.
Part five of The Tomb at Kasubi starts as In 1875, when Stanley passed through
Uganda on his east-to-west crossing of the continent, he saw Mutesa, then about thirty-eight, at
war against Wavuma people on the shore of Lake Victoria. . (Naipaul Masque 26). Naipaul
depicts not only a written text, but also a reproduction of Mutesas drawing by Stanely to
illustrate on the history of Africa: The engraving of Stanleys book, many of them based on
photographs by Stanley; show what the watchers would have seen. They show the beautiful
boats lined up. (Naipaul Masque 27). And the history of a part of Africa evolves with
Stanley: When Stanley next saw Mutesa, Mutesa was in high spirits.. Stanley talked him out

Chowdhury 15

of that, and Stanley also, to everyones relief, mediated a peace between the parties (Naipaul
Masque 28). It is important to remember that Stanley was not a professional historiographer or a
specialist of history, but Naipaul has agreed or relied on his description as a history of Africa.
Edward Said asserts in Orientalism, in the chapter of The Scope of Orientalism:
Yet any account of Orientalism would have to consider not only the professional
Orientalist and his work but also the very notion of a field of study based on a
geographical, cultural, linguistic, and ethnic unit called the Orient. Field, of course, are
made. They acquire coherence and integrity in time because scholars devote themselves
in different ways to what seems to be a commonly agreed-upon subject matter. (50)
V. G. Kiernan termed the effort of the Occident to construct the Other as exotic, mysterious and
unbelievable as a day-dream. Rather than a day-dream we can then return again to Said to
see how the materiality of this discourse was established:
. . . When a learned Orientalist travelled in the country of his specialization, it was
always with unshakable abstract maxims about the civilization he has studied; rarely
were Orientalists interested in anything except proving the validity of these musty
truths by applying them, without great success, to uncomprehending, hence degenerate,
natives. Finally, the very power and scope of Orientalism produced not only a fair
amount of exact positive knowledge about the Orient but also a kind of second-order
knowledgelurking in such places as Oriental tale, the mythology of the mysterious
East, notions like Asian inscrutabilitywith a life of its own, what V.G. Kiernan has
aptly called Europeans collective day-dream of the Orient. (Said 52)
The discourse established by the Occident is claimed as positive knowledge and focuses in its
own way on the reality of the situation:
. . . Yet this is not to say that they know all there is to know, nor, more important, is it to
say that what they know has effectively dispelled the imaginative geographical and
historical knowledge I have been considering. We need not decide here whether this kind
of imaginative knowledge infuses history and geography, or whether in some way
overrides them. Let us just say for the time being that it is there as something more that
what appears to be merely positive knowledge. (Said 55)
Orient is generally assumed as the East. However, if we consider the entire discourse of
Orientalism, it will also include the periphery of Africa. As in the discourse Africa is also

Chowdhury 16

considered as the Other of the West. Naipaul never directly states that Africa or Asia is a direct
opposite of the West or that they are the Other in Western discourse because he is well aware
about overlapping identities of post-colonial era where East and West become integrated. That is
why rather than only comparing Africa with the West; he analyses ideological conflicts in
Africa. Naipaul uses African people or local newspapers as his native informers. One of his
narrators is Susan whose identity is amply revealed by her name: So here, for Susan and people
like her, was another cause for disturbance, something before the horrors of Amin and Obote,
something that went back to the time of the British protectorate (which Mutesa had wanted). It
made now for a full century of disorder (Naipaul Masque 31). Her name is Susan Naluguwa
Kiguli. Her father gave her a Judeo-Christian name then she self-consciously included her clans
name and she also bears her fathers name. She thinks she is a still part of her clan:
My first name is Susan. It was given by my father. Who had disappeared in the Amin
time. He had an aunt whom he adored, and she had this name. So it was a sentimental
choice for him. Yet I know it is a Judeo-Christian name, and when I came to the
university I added my clans nameNaluguwa, which means of the sheep clan. I feel it
is very part of my identity here you have your own name. I could go as Susan
Naluguwa, but I use my fathers surname tooKiguli- because this is how the school
registered me (Naipaul Masque 31)
And Susan continues describing herself as a hybrid colonial being. She explains the duality that
is represented in her accepting modernity as a blessing from colonial rule or from the West.
However, she is conscious that this modernity is also destroying her culture. She recognizes that
civilization is not universal. It varies from region to region and time to time and that one
civilization could not be compared to another. That is why Achebe once said that Africa is a
universe; it is a universe within itself. It has its own periphery. This universe is their own
universe, only their own as Susan remarks:

Chowdhury 17

I feel that it is so much part of the colonial experience, which was not pleasant. When a
person or race comes and imposes on you, it takes away everything, and it is a vicious
thing to do. Much as I think the West and modernity is a good thing, it did take away our
culture and civilization, and even if it is gentle it does make us doubt our roots. For
example, the imposing of their own ideas, dogmas and doctrines, saying that theirs were
the best. There was no two-way dialogue with them trying to understand how our minds
and heritage or culture worked. I feel that my people had a civilization. It was different
but it was their own. I taught myself to write in Luganda. After writing her poems in
English, I feel humiliated that the school did not teach us our mother tongue. (Naipaul
Masque 31-32)
She does not end here but describe goes on to how her land, religion, customs and social
structure were broken and grabbed by the white colonizers. Their king was sent to exile and he
was forced to hand over the kingdom. In between quotes from her, Naipaul mentioned that
Susans sister was writing a book on Speke, Grant and the missionaries. Naipaul was totally
aware of the movement of The Empire writing back. The details of the forthcoming book are
not mentioned. We can guess that her sister was not praising those missionaries or Speke who
wrote about Africa. It clears Naipauls position.
Prince Kassim is another narrator who describes himself as an educated person:
It is true that foreign religions took over the command of the society. They
converted the leaders and the flock followed. . . . My own attitude is that the power of
traditional religion is myth and superstition. Because of my educational background I
have been told it is a pack of lies. I grew up comfortable with the idea of one God.
(Naipaul Masque 38) [My Italics]
The educational system is obviously a Western one that taught the ideologies of western
civilization. The educational system in Africa in the colonial period is described in Ngugi wa
Thiongos Decolonising the Mind (1986). Ngugi describes how his mother tongue was
repressed through the educational system established by the British:
And then I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The
language of my education was no longer the language of my culture. . . .
It was after the declaration of the state of emergency over Kenya in 1952 that all
the schools run by patriotic nationalists were placed under District Education Boards

Chowdhury 18

chaired by Englishmen. English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya,

English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow
before it in defense.
Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu
in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment three to five
strokes of the cane on bare buttocks- or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck
with inscriptions such as I AM STUPID or I AM A DONKEY.. . .
. . . Thus children were turned into witch hunters and in the process were being
taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to ones immediate community. (11)
Similarly, Prince Kassims education had taught him to devalue ancient rites as superstitious.
And there is no doubt Prince Kassim will strengthen Naipauls views on human sacrifice: The
shrine was burnt because it is a place where a lot of human sacrifice was going on. Three months
ago they found a body of a young child very mutilated (Naipaul Masque37). African people are
shown as still sacrificing humans in their rituals, and remain as brutal as Speke or Stanley had
shown.
Naipaul shows the native who believes that violence, corruption and anarchy is a result of
the forced inclusion of other alien cultures:
. . . Once you remove cultural restrains you have chaos and anarchy. People put
under this will do anything to survive. This was like the point Prince Kassim had made.
They will do anything and at the same time they want the technological advances of the
world. The race for these technological luxuries has replaced culture. Our religion was
not savage. It was based on the veneration of the ancestors. If your father dies you
venerate him. You give a libation to the ancestors before you drink. The destruction of
traditions and the lack of cultural restraint, especially for the people who have been
brought together by colonial power and told to form a nation, could only bring disaster.
(Naipaul Masque 59)
Colonial rule washed away African culture and customs, which were then seen as witchcraft.
Modernity as Christianity was always connected with accessing recourses, and is part of
capitalist bourgeois domination. However, pre-colonial African society was a pastoral society
which had no connection with money. As a result modernity, money and church have a

Chowdhury 19

bourgeois connection, and Africa is shown as uncivilized as it cannot serve the purpose of
gaining more profit. As a result, ancient and pastoral cultural diversity of Africa had to be
destroyed:
.. Modernity wants us to sweep our culture away, and that will manifest itself in a
political upheaval. A conflict between Christianity and traditional religion. . . . My
grandmother told me this. But the missionaries called it devil worship. Culture does not
dietoday it is called witchcraft. . . . To me its all about belief and what treats you well.
In traditional religion it was not about money. . . . (Naipaul Masque 60)
At moments Naipaul shows the ambivalent nature of post-colonial writing and in this way he is a
bit different than his fore-runners. However, he returns to his usual manner of representing
African life where he remains doubtful about Africa and African history and customs. He
believes that:
Their history [Baganda people], however, has no dates and no records, because
the Baganda people had no script and no writing. They have only a limited oral literature,
which is a poor substitution for a written text that can be consulted down the centuries.
Strangely, the absence of a script doesnt seem to trouble academic or nationalist people;
it isnt a subject that is talked about. (Naipaul Masque 66)
This is as true as African academics have shown the world that their own past is not written in a
form of history but preserved in oral tradition. They have not only raised the issue but also
challenged the validity of English departments in African academies. Academics and
intellectuals like Ngugi wa Thiongo clearly says in On the Abolition of the English
Department that in their proposed department of literature, there should:
In addition to Swahili, French, and English, whenever feasible other languages
such as Arabic, Hindustani, Kikuyu, Luo, Akamba, etc., should be introduced into the
syllabus as optional subjects.
11. On the literature side, the Department ought to offer roughly:
(a) The oral tradition, which is our primary root;
(b) Swahili literature (with Arabic and Asian literature); this is another root, especially in
East Africa;

Chowdhury 20

(c) A selected course in European literature: yet another root;

(d) Modern African literature. (1997)
Moreover Naipaul has also claimed that the traditional oral culture is about to be lost:
To be without writing, as the Baganda were, was to have no effective way of recording
the extraordinary things they achieved. Much of the past, the thirty-seven kings of which
they boast, is effectively lost, and can be talked of only as myth. The loss continues. In a
literate age, of newspaper and television and radio, the value of oral history steadily
shrinks. (Naipaul Masque 68)
The answer to this is forced in On the Abolition of the English Department. The oral tradition
is declared as a living tradition. To Naipaul it seemed to be dead because his ideas about
Africa derived from the British museum or library and from Orientalist writers whose writings
are only preserved in written forms:
The Oral tradition is rich and many-sided. In fact Africa is littered with Oral tradition.
But the art did not end yesterday; it is a living tradition. . . . Verbal forms are not always
distinct from dance, music, etc. For example, in music there is close correspondence
between verbal and melodic tones; (Thiongo 1997)
Naipaul seems to be trying to detach himself from his narrative. This tendency often
boomerangs, as he is constantly trying to detach history from his narratives as Orientalism states:
Psychologically, Orientalism is a form of paranoia, knowledge of another kind, say, from
ordinary historical knowledge. These are a few of the results, I think, of imaginative geography
and of the dramatic boundaries it draws (72). Said considered Naipaul to be part of this
paranoia. Though he is considered a post-colonialist writer; he can also be described as a
modernist as he is exploring a truth that can be gathered in the museums of Western libraries.
The huge untapped resource of Africa in oral tradition which is the root of the history of African
people is unknown to him. Naipaul is drawing synthesis from a thesis that has not actually
happened in the place where he is applying his synthesis. He has taken a thesis from a knowledge
gained from his own ancestry and taken the antithesis from the contemporary post-colonial

Chowdhury 21

Africa only to put it into his early ideology that Africans are responsible for their own chaos. To
him the British colonial era was a time of peace in Africa:
So Amin and Obote have a kind of ancestry. The British colonial period, with law
and without local wars, has to be seen as interlude. But how do Africans live with their
African history? Perhaps the absence of a script and written records blurs the past;
perhaps the oral story gives them only myths. (Naipaul Masque 28) [My italics]
The relation of ancient history, oral culture and myth will be explored in the second chapter
while discussing Achebe and other African post-colonial writers.
Naipaul continues his journey to Nigeria and observes as expected that Nigerians are
extravagant, and carry a lot of luggage while traveling. Naipaul also mocks the legitimacy of the
Nigerian state, doubting whether they have the legitimacy of independence or of a free state!
Nigerians have their own idea of status. They make sport with things that other
people might take seriously; and diplomatic passport, with its many immunities, was one
of the toys that had come to them with independence and statehood. . . . But in the
Nigerians eye such a man would make much more of a show, would put the seal on his
grandeur, if at Immigration, in full view of the waiting crowd, he could saunter through
the diplomatic channel. (Naipaul Masque 82)
In an essay named V. S. Naipaul: The White Traveler under the Dark Masque Fadwa Abdel
Rahman writes that western travel writers always adopt imperial ideology. This type of
stereotypical representation of the Other by white travelers are inspired by the long lasting
imperial era which had created a false representation. The essayist compares V. S. Naipaul
with Gulliver of Gullivers Travels (1726) who denies his own self as Gulliver did, by showing
Houyhnms as the better half of a civilization. Abdel Rahman quotes from Edward Saids
Intellectuals in the post-colonial World that Naipaul is one such Gulliver who:
. . . belongs to a group of writers who specialize in the thesis of what one of them
has called self- inflicted wounds, which is to say that we 'non-whites' are the cause of all
our problems, not the overly maligned imperialists. . . . Naipaul's account of the Islamic,
Latin American, African, Indian and Caribbean worlds totally ignores a massive infusion

Chowdhury 22

of critical scholarship about those regions in favor of the tritest, the cheapest and the
easiest of colonial mythologies about wogs and darkies. (169)
This type of representation has two visions; one is the dominant view that always condemns the
other for their downfall, a kind of tragic hero view that has emerged from Shakespeares tragic
hero whose follies or fatal flaw itself is the reason for his downfall. Though, most of postcolonial critics criticized Naipaul for this, it is a way of self-searching which can energize the
Other to think about their lacks. However, it is also true that this kind of condemnation can
permanently effect the psychology of the Other as Frantz Fanon explains in his Black Skin White
Masks by quoting Profession D. Westermann, who says on his The Africa Today (1939) The
Negros inferiority complex is particularly intensified among the most educated, who must
struggle with it unceasingly (Fanon 14). In A Bend in the River, we see Indar who in spite of his
education is a kind of alienated being. This may be Naipaul himself as Rahman says. In the same
essay Abdel Rahman also argues that this type of representation is often instigated by a sense of
inferiority of self from which the narrator wants to separate by assimilating himself with the
ideology of the established structure. In this sense, Naipauls Nobel citation should be quote: In
this sense, one literary figure is chosen by virtue of his links to the metropolitan arena, or by his
writing in its language to be a representative of whole peoples and cultures. V. S. Naipaul has
evidently assumed such a representative eminence for many people in the West (Rahman 170).
The essayist argues that Naipaul is a modernist writer and not a post-modernist one, as he is
actually representing a right kind of ideology from a specific point of view or more
importantly from a subjective point of view established by western discourse. In an essay named
Intellectuals of the Post-Colonial World Said points out how writers like Naipaul always try to
prove how Africans themselves are responsible for their calamity. One cannot do anything for

Chowdhury 23

African people as they are creating their own havoc. The theme is a recurrent one in Naipauls
writings:
. . .These people didnt like sending their children to school; they preferred sending them
out to the roads to hawk and trade, to add to the family income. . . . You couldnt build
them new houses with proper sanitation. You could not talk to them about poverty
alleviation. You couldnt do anything for them; and they bred and bred. (Naipaul Masque
115)

Naipaul realizes that any myth derives from another myth has a link to the past. However,
he could not realize that myth could not be created from thin air or without having any
connection with reality. Maybe the reality is not of the near past but of the ancient past. Story
and myth are not the same. When Speke writes in his book about Africa it becomes a sort of
story, however when a community nourishes their past not in written form but as a form of oral
communication from generation to generation it becomes a myth:
It was a perfect story for a place that was the cradle of civilization and the black
race. If I had been introduced to the story told, so to speak, . . . But now, after a meeting
with the grave chiefs, and after a sight of the garden that was the source of life, I
understood a little more. For myths to take on life, they have to be supported by other
myths; and there was enough support of this kind in Ife. (Naipaul Masque 132)
African travel writing operates as a kind of field work, as Speke said in the early nineteen
twenties: They said it was started by European anthropologists. And, indeed, there was an
American in the hotel at that moment, who had come to write about the Hausa and was now at
the end of his field-work (Naipaul Masque144). A writer or researcher from America is
considered more important than African. He can be leveled as a tiny writer who is writing from
Africa: They tiny writer in English said, The inwardness of the people in Kano is part of our
identity, and maybe this is why the social and political advancement is limited. (Naipaul
Masque 144)

Chowdhury 24

Delacroix, an artist famous for his oriental representation, is brought in by Naipaul to

stress the exotic topic of harem life in Africa. This follows the Orientalist depiction of the Orient
as ideal, exotic and erotic:
Delacroixs picture of the ladies of the harem in Algiers shows idle women in colorful
clothes. The vacancy of their minds shows in their faces. I suppose some such picture
the clothes, the idlenesshad worked on the imagination of the Indian woman I met in
Delhi some years ago who said she would have liked nothing more than to be one of the
harem of the Emperor Akbar.. . . This was the picture that was given me later, by a
woman whose mother had spent some unhappy years in the harem of a small Nigerian
chief. (Naipaul Masque 147- 148)
Naipauls mastery is that he can connect the past with present evidence. He connects his
description of a harem by an Orientalist painter, and then asserts that he has evidence of its
existence. In addition to this he has also included the pathetic life story of Laila to strengthen his
idea.
Going on to Ghana; Naipaul states that both Arabs and Europeans came to Africa for
slaves and gold. There is no sense of guilt or wrongdoing. It seems that it is very natural for
European to come Africa for slaves and gold as he has already proved that Africans are
uncivilized and brutal:
On this old map you have to look hard for Accra, the modern capital of Ghana,
among the many sea castle and forts set done since the fifteenth centuryby
Portuguese, Danes, Swedes, Prussians from Brandenburg, Dutch and English, all
dreaming of gold and slaveson this long east-west stretch of the African coast.
(Naipaul Masque 153)
As usual, though Ashanti spirit; is appreciated but all credit goes to Christianity as it made it
mellower and less warlike (Naipaul Masque 156). A noble savage named Richmond is shown
here; he calls the British colonial master and believes that they came to Africa for the purely
business purposes. Moreover, he is very grateful that they gave them the Church, democracy
and Jesus:

Chowdhury 25

He [Richmond] said: The colonial masters came here for business. Slave trade
was a business. Maybe bad, but it was purely business. They took, but they gave us the
church. That was a death knell to traditional religion. In the traditional religion, every
king had his chief priest and elders to consult. It was a democratic system. It promoted
sanity. People did not cross boundaries. The church came and overturned this. They
brought in Jesus. (Naipaul Masque 176)
Richmond also explains how the English language was assimilated and how Christianity
gradually succeeded in erasing traditional religions in this part of Africa: It was new. It had a
policy of assimilation, like the French in the Ivory Coast, but the English did it in an indirect
way. They offered a faith that also brought education. It weakened the traditional religion; in that
way it was like Islam. The only thing that has remained intact is the chieftaincy. (Naipaul
Masque 178) He concludes by indirectly saying that whites are best for Africa and African
people. He gives as example:
It is a passionate statement. Being born in Africa is like being born in ignorance.
We are indolent. Yesterday I encountered a very embarrassing situation. The chief I went
to see lives in a finished building, but it faces a public toilet. The chief was nothing
wrong. I did not want to offend him by telling him that he was living by the cesspit. If I
had sat there two more hours I would have gone to hospital, but he was comfortable. That
is why I say the white man, bad as he was, brought enlightenment. We have a proverb
that the man who has gone nowhere thinks his mothers soup is the best. (Naipaul
Masque 179)

In a chapter named The Forest King V. S. Naipaul describes Ivory Coasts forest
resources. Here, his reference is the Professor Gassiti who first introduced him to the miracle
plant eboga. Professor Gassiti includes the value of the knowledge that they have gained from
nature: She said, The closer we come to the pigmies the more we understand that the world has
a soul and has a life. It has energy. Pigmies are like our memories of the past. They hold
knowledge of the world (Naipaul Masque 237). Naipauls next narrator opposes the concepts
of cannibalism established by the colonizers. Mme Ondo who is a high official in the civil

Chowdhury 26

service strongly claims that Fangs were never cannibals: Mme Ondo [a high civil servant] said,
Fangs were never cannibals. But we dont know what is done in the mystical ceremonies. They
may eat or not eat people. We dont know. It was the colonial way to denigrate the Fangs
because they saw the Fangs as fierce and warlike (Naipaul Masque 245). Finally, he declares
the most important value of their tribes: Mme Ondo said, Here when an old person dies we say
a library has burnt down (Naipaul Masque 245). This is the difference between the West and
Africa. While in the West a library consists of books, in Africa an aged living person is called a
library or an archive of knowledge. More importantly, Ondo also thinks that certain traditions
and certain ways of belief are enshrined in oral tradition:
Hence certain traditions have become institutionalized over generations and cannot be
lost. I agree that if a master of a forge dies, and does not pass the iron-smelting
knowledge to his apprentice, the knowledge of the forge will die. But traditional rites like
initiation and those connected with the oral traditional rites like initiation and those
connected with the oral tradition have preserved their knowledge. (Naipaul Masque 248)
We do not know what Naipaul thinks in this regard because he remains silent on this particular
issue. He just quotes what an African believes regarding their tradition and knowledge. He shows
a clear line of ambiguity among the African narrators. None of them directly abandon their
African lineage and assimilate with the European way of living. They are aware of the necessity
of both African and European ideologies in their life. Naipaul should be credited for being
neutral in this regard. He neither cherished nor criticized this view. In this regard he is often
different from the earlier trends of Orientalists. He has not silenced any of the natives; moreover
he gives them a space to express themselves. However, soon after he returns to his earlier self by
saying that the African eats meat of everything associated with life which though unuttered can
also be human being: Local people liked what they called, in their manly way, bush meat. . . .
Africans, like the French and the Chinese and the Vietnamese, eat everything, not only elephants

Chowdhury 27

and dogs and cats, but everything else with life. (Naipaul Masque 254-55) [My Italics]
Interestingly, as he did give some space to Africans to explain their opinions; gradually he stands
against them. Firstly, he indirectly says that as they eat all kinds of bush meat they can also eat
human meat. Then, he hints that as the past had been erased, this land does not have a history:
When I was a boy in Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic, I used to think that the
light and heat had burned away the history of the place. You couldnt feel that bush or sea
had a history. To have a sense of history you needed buildings, architectures; and history
came to the placeyou seemed to see the change occurringin Marine Square in the
centre of the old Spanish town, and the few ambitions buildings of the British period.
Here at Lambarene there was no architecture, only nondescript tropical buildings, in
ochre-colored distemper, of no distinctive style, that seemed to have eaten up the past.
(Naipaul Masque 274-275) [My Italics]

The text cannot remain apolitical as he has to deal with racial conflict in South Africa: I
had wanted, when I begun this book, to stay away from politics and race, to look below those
themes for the core of African belief. But rather like Fatima looking for identity, I felt stymied in
South Africa and saw that here race was all in all; that race runs deep as religion elsewhere
(Naipaul Masque 288). Here he brings Fatima who is a colored girl and being a colored girl
faces difficulties in South Africa. South Africa is shown as a racial country. However, Naipauls
greatness as a writer is proved when he focuses on the grey areas of post-coloniality: So she
grew up as just a coloured girl, without any identity. The Xhosa girls at the school all had
identities, and she had nothing. She grew up in a coloured community. . . .She went on the
pilgrimage to Mecca, but felt nothing; she saw only the restrictions on her as a woman (Naipaul
Masque 286-87). Each narrator Naipaul chooses represents ambiguous multiple identities of the
post-colonial era. Most of them are hybrid in their conscience as well as in their physical
existences. Neither of them is purely African or Western in their conscience nor in their practical

Chowdhury 28

way of living. Depiction of such overlapping psychological states of post-colonial beings gives
Naipaul a unique quality. As we will see in A Bend in the River, characteristics of homelessness
and search of a being ends in utter despair and hollowness. In this travel book we see a similar
picture:
She begun to look then for a black identity, but it was hard. Her coloured
background again got in the way; the blacks rejected her as someone without a country or
culture. So the whole South African journey for her was a discovery of pain: . . . It was
only then that she understood the great pain and, with that, the deception, for Africans, of
political freedom and the end of Apartheid. (Naipaul Masque 287-88)
She cannot relate herself to African blackness and she never will be accepted in the fair world. A
fear of homelessness of alienated soul always dictates in fictional as well as in non-fictional
characters of Naipauls writings.

V. S Naipauls A Bend in the River published in 1979, is a fictional rendering based on

many of the insights in The Masque of Arica. This novel is a return to Conrads Heart of
Darkness in the context of post-colonial hybrid society. In the novel, we see the negative
portrayal of Africa as a continent of violence and decadence. The presence of post-colonial
hybridity and cross-cultural interaction among the characters shows how A Bend in the River is a
progression of Heart of Darkness.
Salim is the protagonist as well the narrator of the novel. He is an alienated soul lost in
Africa in pursuit for a suitable place of his own. He is an educated person. His notion of history
and his past is as well constructed through the knowledge acquired from Europeans as he
confesses: All that I know of our history and the history of the Indian Ocean I have got from
books written by Europeans. . . Without Europeans, I feel, all our past would have been washed

Chowdhury 29

away, like the scuff-marks of fishermen on the beach our town (Naipaul Bend 13). He is
grateful to Europeans for giving him his past or in other words his trace of origin or identity.
One can doubt that history as a branch of knowledge is enriched by the European historians.
However, what is important in the representation of Naipauls narrative is that Europeans are
depicted as the preservers of the African past. In an emerging African hybrid society, Salim
experiences a crisis of identity as he is neither considered as a native nor as a foreigner. Neither
native embraces him as their own nor does he embrace the native as part of his community. It
makes him a person of Indian Diaspora where there always remain senses of homelessness.
However, to Europeans Africa is a relic. It has passed away. The civilization and culture
of Africa is no more as Father Huismans senses that Africa is dying. He collects and preserves
African relics. For him true Africa remains in museums: The Masques and carvings looked old.
They could have been any age, a hundred years old. But they were dated; Father Huismans had
dated them. . . And to Father Huismans colonial relics were as precious as the things of Africa.
True Africa he saw dying or about to die (Naipaul Bend 72). The existence of African history
and civilization in European discourse is denied or reduced to mere superstition. Moreover, in an
era of post-colonialism; Africa becomes a blend of Europe and Africa; as a result it is not
possible to see the existence of Africa separately; in other words the essence of Africa is dead to
the Europeans. A European always believes that the true Africa is a land of superstitious beliefs,
customs and bush life. In this emerging hybrid post-colonial Africa, true Africa can rarely be
seen. Undoubtedly Naipaul intends to depict this hybrid Africa in his fiction.
In this novel, Africa is portrayed as a continent of failure. The narrator describes Africa
as a continent where they always drink alcohol; even the children are habituated to it:

Chowdhury 30

Beer was part of peoples food here; children drank it; people began drinking from early
in the morning. We had no local brewery, and a lot of the cargo brought up by the
steamers was that weak lager the people here loved. . . . About women, the attitude was
just as matter-of-fact. Shortly after I arrived my friend Mahesh told me that women slept
with men whenever they were asked; a man could knock on any womans door and sleep
with her. . . . To Mahesh the sexual casualness was part of the chaos and corruption of the
place. (Naipaul Bend 44)
The women of Africa are shown in an erotic way, simply as whores as they have no individual
characteristics and all African women are the same. In this generalized representation; Africa is
Orientalized. The African nation states are sites of failure where there is constant chaos and
violence. In the novel, we see the African nations affected by war, semi-tribal conflicts or
military coups. Rather than finding the true reasons, the novel shows that Africans themselves
are actually responsible for their destruction: Having destroyed their town, they had grieved for
it, they had wished to see it a living place again (Naipaul Bend 76). The narrator says that
everybody in post-colonial Africa can have a gun as a result any African tribe could become a
warrior tribe. Post-colonial Africa is always ruled by an army man. The Big man is an army
person and he actually dictates the country. The brutality of the Big man is also shown by his
cruel revenge against his perspective enemy. The nation experiences prosperity for a brief period
by establishing The New Domain which becomes the place for education and intellectual
practices. At the same line, the country also experiences an economic boom. However, it does
not exist for long. Corruption returns. The government officers become corrupt:
It was outrageous. Prosper knew it was outrageous. In the old days five dollars was
considered pretty good; and even during the boom you could get many things done for
twenty-five dollars. Things had changed since the insurrection, of course, and had
become very bad with the radicalization. Everyone had become more greedy and
desperate. There was this feeling of everything running down very fast, of great chaos
coming; and some people could behave as though money had already lost its value. But
even so, officials like Prosper had only recently begun to talk in hundreds. (Naipaul Bend
321)

Chowdhury 31

As a result, we can conclude that this is a representation of Africa that further strengthens the
discourse of Orientalism. Furthermore, we see an echo of Conradian attitude as Salim says that
Africans do not know how to live. He compares his own life with the Africans. He thinks that
Ferdinand despite his education will not be any different. He considers himself to be different
from and superior to African people.
In the novel, we do not see any African round character. Like in The Heart of Darkness
we can feel an absence of African characters who can represent Africa. Zabeth is the only
character who has been portrayed as a strong character, though she is considered as a magician.
It means that she is also represented in an exotic manner. Zabeth is the only African character
who has been portrayed as a positive African character. Still she is a magician: Zabeth, as a
magician or sorceress, kept herself away from men. But it hadnt always been so; Zabeth hadnt
always been so; Zabeth hadnt always been a magician (Naipaul Bend 39). On the other hand,
new Citizen of the time is represented as lazy and drunk: Citizen Theotime would come in the
morning, red-eyed and tormented looking, high on his breakfast beer, with a couple of comic
books or photo-novels to see him through office hours (Naipaul Bend 307).
However, V. S. Naipaul is not as biased as Conrad in Heart of Darkness. Naipaul is
ambivalent in his representation of hybrid post-colonial Africa. He points out how Africa is still
dominated by a Eurocentric ideology and how the idea of African history comes from European
intellectuals: If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe,
I feel, that also introduced us to the lie (Naipaul Bend 19). He also shows how the new Domain
is modeled on Eurocentric ideas; how at a historic point the White man of the Domain Raymond
becomes powerful. Finally, the protagonist of the novel and his friend Indar are two hybrid
personalities who struggle to find their identities. Both of them are displaced persons looking for

Chowdhury 32

a place or home. In this post-colonial situation they cannot determine their identity because they
have become part of both Western and African identity. It is important to mention that this
Oriental identity does not only determined by the geographical existence of East as we see in
Orientalism how even Arabs and Africans are as well orientalised within the discourse of
Orientalism.
Naipaul is conscious of this timeless phenomenon of post-colonialism where colonizers
become part of the natives as time progresses and power shifts. The narrator says about the
Arabs that:
Once, great explorers and warriors, the Arabs had ruled. They had pushed far into the
interior and had built towns and planted orchards in the forest. Then their power had been
broken by Europe. There towns and orchards disappeared, swallowed up in bush. They
ceased to be driven on by their idea of their position in the world, and their energy was
lost; they forgot who they were and where they had come from. (Naipaul Bend 16)
It shows how the intermingling of different races is an eternal phenomenon. In the novel, it also
shown in the Big Mans confused state of being an African nationalist or being a Eurocentric
leader. In his first attempt, he tries to create a good relationship with the West for both economic
and educational purposes. He establishes the New Domain as an attempt to Europeanize the
educational system. However, the big man changes his mind and initiates radicalization in a postcolonial world where there is no fixed identity and such experiments are bound a fail. Naipaul
tries to show the ambivalent nature of post-colonial people. All characters in this novel have an
ambivalent position as Said says in Culture and Imperialism: My argument is that only the
second perspective is fully sensitive to the reality of historical experience. Partly because of
empire, all cultures are involved in one another: none is single and pure, all are hybrid,
heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated and unmonolithic (Said xxix). The novel portrays

Chowdhury 33

Africa as an insecure alienated world; however, this is the real nature of post-colonial worlds
which Naipaul has successfully portrayed.
Africa is shown as a continent of violence. The narrator says The country, like others in
Africa, had had its trouble after independence. . . Too many of the places on the way have closed
down or are full of blood (Naipaul Bend 3). Salim describes his experiences of his travel in his
Peugeot from the coast to the Centre of Africa. The narrator thinks that the colonial period was
miraculously peaceful . . , he had travelled about the country during the miraculous peace of the
colonial period (Naipaul Bend 39). In the novel national and personal violence are depicted
simultaneously. In an essay named A variation on the Theme of Violence and Antagonism in V.
S. Naipauls Fiction Ben Abbes explains how and why Salim behaves in a sexually violent way:
Salim, in A Bend in the River, treats Yvette in the same way and with the same violence.
As an Indian exiled from his society he lives an antagonistic relationship with his
environment. He tries to avenge himself with Yvette the British wife of the Big Man's
propagandist. She is in a way responsible for the country's present explosive situation, for
she represents also the imperialist forces in Central Africa. In one of Salim's sexual
encounters with this married woman Salim says: I spat on her between her legs until I had
no more spit. All her softness vanished in outrage. Jimmy as well as Salim sees in these
women the hidden forces that shackle their societies. Hence, sexual violence is inflicted
on them in an awkward attempt to give one's action a meaning. In a society which "denies
itself heroes" and where ambitions are abortive, violence in all its aspects proliferates and
antagonism contributes in the dislocation of the society itself. (57)
Salims psychological disorder resulted from a sense of insecurity and homelessness and is
undoubtedly the reason behind this incoherent behavior. His repressed soul revolts against his
most adored one in whom he felt a sense of security and love in his insecure and loveless
alienated life. However, in his unconscious mind he always feels that this sense of security is not
permanent and will not be there forever for him. As a result, his unconscious revolts against this
temporary sense of security.

Chowdhury 34

Representation of Africa is revealed in the contrasting characteristics between Salim and

Ferninand. They always doubt each other. There is always a gap between the two of them. It
seems that Ferdinand feels comfortable with Metty rather than with Salim. His mother decides to
send him to a school in the town where Salim lives and appoints Salim as a local guardian. His
mother thinks that education can only be learned from foreigners. In contrast to his mother
Ferdinand doubts a foreigner. Zabeth believes that her son should acquire new skills by
educating himself. Zabeth wants Salim as one of his sons guide, however Salim senses mocking
in the boys eyes: There was something distant and slightly mocking in his eyes. (Naipaul
Bend 41). He senses that to Ferdinand he is a kind of intruder who is not African. He does not
believe him in his education and status. Ferdinand is an epitome of native people of Africa who
keeps a distance from people like Salim and his community because they still cannot believe
those intruders. A sense of disbelief dominates the relationship between Salim and Ferdinand.
Ferdinand as an African character is only described partially. He is portrayed as a boy from the
bush who always wears a mask over his face:
In his face I felt I could see the starting point of certain kinds of African mask, in which
features were simplified and strengthened; and with memories of those mask, I thought I
saw a special distinction in his features. The idea came to me that I was looking at
Ferdinand with the eyes of an African, and that was how I always looked at him. It was
the effect on me of his face, which I saw then and later as one of great power. (Naipaul
Bend 42)
This gap between the native and Salim evokes a sense of alienation. He cannot relate to the
African way of life. As a result, as in Naipauls travel narrative The Masque of Africa; Salim also
discovers a mask that is hiding Africa from him. Salim cannot associate himself with native
Africans. This novel becomes a representation of an alienated post-colonial soul rather than a
representation of Africa. Salim confesses: The trouble was that I was unwilling and very soon
unable to chat with him as I would have done with another African. I felt that with him I had to

Chowdhury 35

make a special effort, and I didnt know what I could do (Naipaul Bend 43). It becomes clear
that Salim is unable to read an African mind because there is always a gap between the two. In
contrast to Salim; Ferninand becomes friends with Metty. They are very close to each other:
Ferdinand and Metty could drink in the little bars and openly pick up women or drop in at the
houses of women they had got to know. It was I as master of the one man and guardian of the
other who had to hide (Naipaul Bend 45). It shows that Salim cannot relate with ordinary
Africans. He always feels a distance from native Africans. In his unconscious he is a mimic man
who tends to be a European.
Here comes a similarity between the author of the novel and the protagonist. In an essay
named Locating Naipaul: Not English, Not Indian, Not Trinidadian Harish Trivedi explains
Naipauls homeless state:
Never perhaps has Naipaul lived on the edge of constant hysteria (in his own accurately
chosen word) as during that first year-long sojourn in India in 1962-63; it was a
journey, as he simply enough summed it up later, that broke my life in two (Naipaul,
Two Worlds 193). Ever since, Naipauls life, though ostensibly tethered to a peg of a
home in England, has been emotionally homeless and incurably footloose; it is as if he
has chosen to be peripatetic by vocation (19)
Salim is in his identity no different from the novelist himself. Both of them are mimic men
desiring a European identity ends in utter disdain of regrettable states. In another essay named
Claiming the Burden: Naipauls Africa Ranu Samantrai explains Naipauls categorization of
Europeans, Africans and Arabs races:
The primary groups of actors in Naipaul's Africa Europeans, Arabs and an adjacent
group of Indians, and Africanseach manifest a discrete sexual energy that determines
their position on the evolutionary ladder leading to modern man. Africans are the most
feminized and the least evolved; not surprisingly, Europeans occupy the pinnacles of both
masculinity and development. Arabs fall somewhere in between, but do so because of a
curious twist: they are not newcomers to civilization, but are rendered effeminate because
their civilizations are too old. In other words, while Africans are pre-oedipal, Arabs are
senile, made impotent by their great age. In each case, males are taken to be

Chowdhury 36

representatives of the group, their virility serving as the measure of the group's
development. Together, the three "races" of Naipaul's Africa form a parable of the
colonial encounter that affirms European colonial rule as the only logical order that can
govern all fairly. (52)
In this categorization we cannot put Salim in any group. It means he is of no group however
intending to assimilate himself with the Europeans as characteristics of a post-colonial mimic
man. In the same essay Samantrai concludes by saying:
The logical conclusion that must be drawn from A Bend in the River, then, is that Africa
must be ruled by Europe, and for its own good. It must be protected from itself and its
people, from the destruction that well meaning but incompetent women and children?
Those who can never be the agents driving the machine of progress? Can wreak if left
unregulated. Long after their official departure from the continent, Naipaul's Europeans
continue to be the only people who can tame it. (59)
Salim approves this type of unquestionable acceptance of European superiority throughout the
novel. As a result, Salim can never be a part of African soul instead who can be viewed as a postcolonial being posted in chaotic post-colonial Africa.
Naipauls narrative style is an important tool of representing post-colonial writings. If we
analyze Naipaul's travel writing, the boundaries between genres are usually blurred so that "the
customary distinctions between fiction and non-fiction are of subordinate importance," as the
Nobel Foundation puts it ["Press Release by Nobel Foundation" (172)]. However, I would also
like to stress this particular point that he tries to fictionalize his non-fictional essay because he
wants to fictionalize the African past. Naipaul is presenting it as unreal and exotic rather than
just describing his imaginative power in his non-fictional writing. Though there is nothing wrong
in using imagination creatively, the use of myth as fact makes it problematic. He describes the
myth of sacrifice especially human sacrifice as a fact of the African past. Interestingly enough if
we consider the sources of these stories, they seem to be part of myth. Let us look Derek
Walcotts essay The Muse of History, in this Walcott tries to focus on myth what is carried

Chowdhury 37

from history. However, if we take myth in a literal meaning, it becomes an absurd representation
of history. Myth is not history. It is true for Africa that the ancient past had not been archived in
written form, and that it had traveled through time and through space through the story teller, we
have to look at this history differently. However, to make it entertaining the story tellers of
different times had modified their story in different forms as a result myth was created. Achebe
in his representation of African Igbo culture has taken and used myth as it, not in a literal sense
but as metamorphosed signs. These writers [classicists] reject the idea of history as time for its
original concept as myth, the partial recall of the race. For them history is fiction, subject to a
fitful muse, memory. Their philosophy, based on a contempt for historic time, is revolutionary,
for what they repeat to the New World is its simultaneity with the old (329). Walcott truly
realizes and emphasizes on the topic that . . . Facts evaporates into myth. . . (371). V. S.
Naipaul does not seem to understand the futility of using myth as a source instead he establishes
African identity as an exotic to his readers.
Said in Intellectuals in the post-Colonial World shows how a politics of blame has
flourished in post-colonial writing and distinguished two lines derived from Joseph Conrad.
Naipaul is leading the trend who is representing the Other from the view point of a self or of the
West instead of acknowledging a post-colonial identity. According to Said, Conrads narratives
have a dual existence in post-colonialism:
The form of Conrad's narrative has had two lives in the post- colonial world. Its
assertive sovereign inclusiveness has been reproduced by those who speak today for the
West, what the West did, and what the rest of the world is, was, and may be. The
inflections of this discourse are to exclude what has been represented as "lost" by showing that the colonial world was, religiously and ontologically speaking, lost to begin with,
irredeemable, irrecusably corrupt. Moreover, it focuses not on what was shared in the
colonial experience . . . . The effect of this discourse is to draw like-minded people- the
aggressive Westerners and those people outside the West for whom the Ayatollahs speakaway from the ongoing interchange into a regrettably tight little circle. Inside the circle

Chowdhury 38

stand the blameless, the just, the omnicompetent, those who know the truth about
themselves as well as the others: outside the circle stand a miscellaneous bunch of
querulous whining complainers who have spilt the milk and continue to cry over it. (4950)
Said describes the second trend of Conrads narrative as resistant of the totalizing view of the
West, where Chinua Achebe declares an existence of Igbo culture as a possessor of its individual
goods and evils. He represents the periphery and denies Europe as a centre of discourse of a
universe. The second line is a resistance of the representation of the white self. More importantly
a counter discourse is derived to defend the earlier discourse established by Conrad and his
descendants like Naipaul:
. . .the second life of Conrad's narrative form, which indicates the existence of a
perspective from outside the representations provided by Marlow and his listeners. It is,
above all, a profoundly secular perspective, and it is neither beholden to notions about
historical destiny and the essentialism that destiny always seems to entail, nor about
historical indifference and resignation. To the extent that being on the inside results in
shutting out, editing and subordinating the full experience of colonialism to the
dominance of one Eurocentric and totalizing view, this one adumbrates the presence of a
field without special historical privileges in it for one party over all the others. (52) [My
Italics]
Now we can conclude this chapter by assuming that Naipaul is directly blaming Africans for
their miserable situation, never the colonialists or the long period of colonial rule. He clearly
bears traces from Conrad and represents his Orientalist trend by representing Africans as the
Other. More specifically, in his representation, Africa is almost absent. He stresses on the
emerging situations of post-colonialism in Africa as rootless, homeless and from the perspective
of the alienation of the protagonist.

Chowdhury 39

CHAPTER TWO
ANTITHESIS: RESISTANCE

. . .I have mentioned Naipaul again and again and I'll mention him again here as the case
of a brilliant writer who sold himself to the West. And one day he'll be "rewarded" with
maybe a Nobel Prize or something. Meanwhile he is getting a lot of attention. But I don't
think I can get into that kind of act. (An interview of Chinua Achebe published in The
Massachusetts Review, 285)

Resistance has come through re-representation of Igbo culture in the writings of Chinua
Achebe. He does not represent one of the African clans as ancient or one rich or one of the oldest
cultural identities in our universe. He represents African as a universe that possesses all the
necessary elements of humanity within it. Humanity is not always liberal humanism as defined
by Occidental writers rather a combination of the duality of human nature, a combination of
good and evil, a combination of love and hatred. Achebe has taken myth as the ancient root of
African civilization, which we have seen, is used to misrepresent Africa by V. S. Naipaul.
Achebe has chosen this myth because he truly knows that myth came from the oral traditions of
Africa. Myths provide him with a dense store-house of ancient African history.

Negritude has been posed as an antithesis to modern European humanism. European

discourse used the ideology of humanism as derived from the European renaissance. Even while
talking about humanism, the era of exploration of the new world had also begun. Thus the
Elizabethan period as well as the age of Enlightenment was based on humanist philosophy,
which established the superiority of European knowledge and thought. However, with the age
of discovery and conquest, European humanism denied the same kind of superiority to other
races and lands, but put the onus on themselves of civilising other races. Thus humanism

Chowdhury 40

worked as an epistemic break as Foucault describes in Archeology of Knowledge (1969). Thus

Europe considered its science and philosophy to be superior, and anything other than these
paradigms were not considered to be civilized or of any value. The same notion has been applied
to religion, culture and superstition. In order to reverse this and to reevaluate African culture and
civilization Senghor in his essay entitled Negritude declares . . . , negritude is necessary in the
world today: it is a humanism of the twentieth century. (28) From the same point of view, this
European standard of humanism is declared as Murderous Humanitarianism as Robin D. G.
Kelley describes in his A Poetics of Anticolonialism while discussing about Aime Ceasaires
Discourse on Colonialism (1955) (19). Industrialization was accompanied by the advent of
capitalism, as well as the colonial venture. As a result, western civilization cannot be separated
from a capitalist society that is directly connected with imperialism and colonialism as
colonialism was directed to earning resources through invading other lands: They viewed
fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism, global systems rooted not only in
capitalist political economy but racist ideologies that were already in place at the dawn of
modernity (Ceasaire 21). This western modern capitalist economy is based on a law of
difference. The law of difference is reflected in the representation in post-colonial writings. As
Abdul R. Janmohamed states in his essay The Economy of Manichean Allegory:
Colonialist literature is an exploration and a representation of a world at the
boundaries of civilization, a world that has not (yet) been domesticated by European
signification or codified in detail by its ideology. This world is therefore perceived as
uncontrollable, chaotic, unattainable, and ultimately evil. Motivated by his desire to
conquer and dominate, the imperialist configures the colonial realm as a confrontation
based on difference in race, language, social customs, cultural values, and modes of
production. (19)
This is how, writers like Naipaul represents Africa on the basis of Identity of difference (19)
and as Abdul R. Janmohamed says, he refuses to see the authenticity and unique characteristic of

Chowdhury 41

a different civilization or culture: If he assumes that he and the Other are essentially identical,
then he would tend to ignore the significant divergences and to judge the Other according to his
own cultural values. (19) In this way the Western intellectuals ignore the basic characteristics of
diversity between human races and initiate Orientalist discourse:
Instead of being an exploration of the racial Other, such literature merely affirms
its own ethnocentric assumptions; instead of actually depicting the outer limits of
civilization, it simply codifies and preserves the structures of its own mentality. While
the surface of each colonialist text purports to represent specific encounters with specific
varieties of the racial Other, the subtext valorizes the superiority of European cultures, of
the collective process that has mediated that representation. Such literature is essentially
specular: instead of seeing the native as a bridge toward syncretic possibility, it uses him
as a mirror that reflects the colonialists self-image. (Janmohamed 19)
Writers like Chinua Achebe questions established ideology based on identity of difference.
Achebes purpose is however not to establish Igbo culture as superior to European civilization,
but to show the existence of African history not as archived by colonialist writers, but which
exists within African own heritage of negritude. As Aime Cesaire explains in his Discourse on
Colonialism: The very idea that there was a superior race lay at the heart of the matter, and
this is why elements of Discourse also drew in Negritudes impulse to recover the history of
Africas accomplishments. (21) It is a different identity, a different trend of history: . . .
exhumed from the past, spread with its inside out, made it possible for me to find a valid
historical place. The white man was wrong, I was not a primitive, not even a half-man, I
belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago(
Kelley 23). Negritude turned out to be a miraculous weapon in the struggle to overthrow the
concept of the barbarian Negro. As Cedric Robinson points out in Black Marxism: The
Masking of the Black Radical Tradition, (2000) the civilization of Europe was enriched by the
incorporation of ancient African knowledge, even while Europeans have tried to erase the trace
of blackness from their culture:

Chowdhury 42

. . .by extension the fabrication of whiteness and all the racial boundary policing that
came with itrequired immense expenditures of psychic and intellectual energies of the
West. An entire generation of enlightened European scholars worked hard to wipe out
the culture and intellectual contributions of Egypt and Nubia from European history, to
whiten the West in order to maintain the purity of the European race. They also
stripped all of Africa of any semblance of civilization, using the printed page to
eradicate their history and thus reduce a whole continent and its progeny to little more
than beasts of burden or brutish heathens. The result is the fabrication of Europe as a
discrete, racially pure entity, solely responsible for modernity, on the other hand, and the
fabrication of the Negro on the other. (22)
In contrast to established Orientalist discourse where a concept of universalism in the name of
liberal humanism denies any existence of different characteristics of Other worlds as in the
introduction of the second part entitled Universality and Difference of The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader explains:
The myth of universality is thus a primary strategy of imperial control as it is manifested
in literary study and that is why it demands attention early on in this Reader. The
universalist myth has, according to Chinua Achebe, a pernicious effect in the kind of
colonialist criticism which denigrates the post-colonial text on the basis of an assumption
that European equals universal.(Post-Colonial Studies Reader,71)
As a result Chinua Achebe leans to the consciousness of negritude as Leopold Sedar Senghor
explains in his famous essay named Negritude: A Humanism of the Twentieth Century:
No, negritude is neither of these things. It is neither racialism nor self-negation.
Yet it is not just affirmation; it is rooting oneself in oneself, and self-confirmation:
confirmation of ones being. Negritude is nothing more or less than what some Englishspeaking Africans have called the African personality. It is no different from the black
personality discovered and proclaimed by the American New Negro movement. As the
American Negro poet, Langston Hughes wrote after the first world war: We, the creator
of new generation, want to give expression to our black personality without shame or
fear. . . . We know we are handsome. Ugly as well. The drums weep and the drums
laugh. Perhaps our only originality, since it was the West Indian poet Aime Cesaire who
coined the word negritude, is to have attempted to define the concept a little more
closely; to have developed it as a weapon, as an instrument of liberation and as a
contribution to the humanism of the twentieth century. (27)
Moreover, Achebe in his novel Things Fall Apart (1958) actually tries to show a different
civilization or an African humanism totally unique in its characteristics that is different from the
capitalist western civilization:

Chowdhury 43

. . . Ethnologists and sociologists today speak of different civilizations. . . . Who would

deny that Africans, too, have a certain way of speaking, singing and dancing; of painting
and sculpturing, and even of laughing and crying? Nobody, probably; for otherwise we
would not have been talking about Negro art for the last sixty years and Africa would
be the only continent today without its ethnologists and sociologists. What, then, is
negritude? It is- as you can guess from what precedes the sum of the cultural values of
the black world; that is, a certain active presence in the world, or better, in the universe.
It is, as John Reed and Clive Wake call it, a certain way of relating oneself to the world
and to others. Yes, it is essentially relations with others. Because of what it is, negritude
is necessary in the world today: it is a humanism of the twentieth century. (Senghor 2728)
Chinua Achebe represents the African world as a different humanism of the twentieth century
that can be called negritude. His position of representing African identity is certainly in
opposition of Naipaul and in the line of Fanon, Senghor, Cesaire and others who are the
propagators of negritude.

In Discourse on Colonialism Aime Cesaire discusses about colonization and

civilization, showing how a line of Oriental discourse has identified civilization with
Christianity, on the other hand has associated savagery with paganism, thus continuing
domination on the basis of race. Cesaire says:
. . .; that the slavering apologists came later; that the chief culprit in this domain is
Christian pedantry, which laid down the dishonest equations Christianity= civilization,
paganism=savagery, from which there could not but ensue abominable colonialist and
racist consequences, whose victims were to be the Indians, the Yellow peoples, and the
Negroes. (33)
Unlike Naipaul in Things Fall Apart Achebe tries to find how European civilization is directly
responsible for African misery. Though Europeans tend to show the superiority of their
civilization Aime Cesaire thoughtfully explains how colonization has already corrupted white
European civilization:

Chowdhury 44

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to

brutalize him in true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awake him to buried instincts,
to covetousness, violence, race hatred and moral relativism;. . ., all these patriots who
have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the
boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe
and slowly but surely, the continent proceeds towards savagery. (36)
This is why he argues Nazism emerged in Europe. They have become the victims of what they
have cultivated within themselves for a long time. They are the victims of what they had been
practicing against others world as a result Ceasaire says they themselves are responsible for this
barbarism: . . . , it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the
fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved
exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa.(36)
Ceasaire explains that is why the Western humanism is Pseudo-humanism (37). In the process
of industrialization capitalism has thoroughly changed the basic ideology of western civilization.
He stresses the point that capitalism in the name of humanism cannot but create a figure like
Hitler . . . At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.
(Ceasaire 37) As a result, when Western Orientalist discourse represents or speaks, it represents a
pseudo-humanism:
Who is speaking? I am ashamed to say it: it is the Western humanist, the
idealist philosopher. That his name is Renan is an accident. . . .
What am I driving at? At this idea : that no one colonizes innocently, that no one
colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which
justifies colonizationand therefore forceis already a sick civilization, a civilization
which is morally diseased, which irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to
another, one denial to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment. (Ceasaire 37-39)
In this way, a civilization led by colonizers metamorphoses into a civilization that sees others as
non-human and as devoid of humanity and civilization: . . ., who in order to ease his conscience
gets into the habit of seeing man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal,
and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect

Chowdhury 45

of colonization that I wanted to point out (Ceasaire 41). As their souls are corrupted they use
colonies as a safety valve where they pour out their hatred. Between colonizer and colonized
there is room only for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape,
compulsory crops, contempt, mistrust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless
elites, degraded masses (Ceasaire 42). The colonizers treat Other as an Object. They try to
civilize the colonized by detaching them from their roots : . . .I am talking about millions of
men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their lifefrom life, from the dance, from
wisdom (Ceasaire 43). Colonized people are systematically demoralized: I am talking about
millions of men in whom fear has been cunningly instilled, who have been taught to have an
inferiority complex, to tremble, kneel, despair, and behave like flunkeys (Ceasaire 43).

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe was published in 1958 in the context of the fall of
African culture as a result of colonial rule in Africa. Unlike Naipaul and Conrad, he has tried to
interpret African characters and culture authentically. In the novel, we observe a representation
of African culture that is full of vitality and action. Achebe as an African has tried to reveal the
reason of the downfall of African glory. In that process he has also shown that this downfall is
due to European colonial rule. Instead of being guilty of double identity 1 he has successfully
used the language of colonizers as an instrument of protest against imperial power.
Achebe has portrayed African characters like Okonkwo without being biased. He shapes
the character with its strengths and follies. In the same line, the novelist also portrays three
1

The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, publishing his first novel, Things Fall Apart, in 1958, was criticized by an
early reviewer for affecting to identity with African villagers when actually his university education and his
broadcasting job in the capital city of Lagos should make him identify, it was implied, with the values of
civilization, supposedly brought to Africa by Europeans. This emphasis on identity as doubled, or hybrid, or
unstable is a third characteristic of the postcolonial approach. (p 195-196) (Peter Berry, Beginning Theory)

Chowdhury 46

generations of Okonkwos family. In this process he has portrayed Okonkwo as a human being
who can mediate his own life according to his own wishes. More importantly, he becomes a
human character who expresses his anguish, fear and hatred. He is not a generalized personality
like The African. Moreover, Achebe shows how diverse Africa can be. He describes three
characters of a family line as totally different from each other. He portrays Okonkwos father
Unoka as a lazy person who was an unsuccessful man throughout his life. On the other hand,
Okonkwos son Nwoye converts himself to Christianity, under the influence of the Christian
missionaries. Achebe shows that Africans cannot be homogenized as Conrad or Naipaul had
done in their novels. African characters have their individual identities and they are no less
interesting as a character in a novel. Achebe represents this through Okonkwos struggle to
achieve a leading position in his clan. He is a family man as well as a warrior:
Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest,
lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children. Perhaps down in
his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the
fear of failure and of weakness. It was deeper and more intimate than the fear of evil and
capricious gods and of magic, the fear of the forest, and the forces of nature, malevolent,
red in tooth and claw. Okonkwos fear was greater that these. It was not external but lay
deep within himself. It was he fear of himself, lest he should be found to resemble his
father. Even as a little boy he had resented his fathers failure and weakness . . . (Achebe
Things 10)
He is a father as well as a killer. He has already killed five persons in different wars. Moreover,
he kills Ikemefuna whom he considered as one of his sons only because: He was afraid of being
thought weak (Achebe Things 43). However, after the killing, he suffers both emotionally and
knows deep in his conscience that he had done a wrong act. His downfall begins from this point
onwards. The great hero metamorphoses into a tragic hero. This is the main difference among
Achebe and Naipaul, who has never tried to penetrate into an African soul. He has just applied
his observations superficially while Achebe has successfully portrayed character.

Chowdhury 47

African society is changing fast. Changing of religion is thus another important

phenomenon of the novel. Nwoye also converts his religion from paganism to Christianity. All
the villagers mock the missionaries and the interpreter, Nwoye becomes quite convinced:
But there was a young lad who had been captivated. His name was Nwoye, Okonkwos
first son. It was not the mad logic of the Trinity that captivated him. He did not
understand it. It was the poetry of the new religion, something felt in the marrow. The
hymn about brothers who sat in darkness and in fear seemed to answer a vague and
persistent question that haunted his young soul the question of the twins crying in the
bush and the question of Ikemefuna who was killed. He felt a relief within as the hymn
poured into his parched soul. The words of the hymn were like the drops of frozen rain
melting on the dry plate of the panting earth. Nwoyes callow mind was greatly puzzled.
(Achebe Things 104)
In a way, it is a criticism of contemporary African society. Achebe explores the loopholes of the
Igbo society that also have a role in the abrupt changes. He has shown that it is much more the
incoherence of the rituals of the Igbo culture rather than the pure attraction of Christianity has
motivated Nwoye to change his religion. In a way, Achebe is also criticizing the Igbo society.
Achebe has humanized the African characters. Patriarchal African society is shown to be
full of flaws. Women are shown as victims of Okonkwos tyranny and rage. Though Okonkwos
first wife tries to save Ojiugo by lying to her husband, Ojiugo becomes a victim of her husbands
rage during the sacred week: Okonkwo knew she was not speaking the truth. He walked back
to his obi to wait Ojiugos return. And when she returned he beat her very heavily. In his anger
he had forgotten that it was the week of Peace. (Achebe Things 21) Most importantly, through
this simple incident Chinua Achebe has portrayed the hubris of a tragic hero. Okonkwos rage is
the reason of his downfall.
Achebe has also portrayed diversity among the Igbo tribes. He has described the taboos
and superstitions of the tribes. In this process, Achebe tries to reveal African culture as real and
diverse. He describes different clan festivals and customs. He wants to show African culture to

Chowdhury 48

the world, which had only been seen through Western representations prior to this. Western
writers like Conrad has depicted African culture as savage, exotic and mysterious. Achebe wants
to reveal Africa to the world with the help of a new English as he himself had proposed in one
of his essays. Achebes use of English language is interesting, as he uses lots of words from the
Igbo language giving a new flavor to the English language. He has successfully used the
colonizers language as he asserts in his essay The African Writer and the English Language:
What I do see is a new voice coming out of Africa, speaking of African experience in a
world-wide language. . . . The African writer should aim to use English in a way that
brings out his message best without altering the language to the extent that its value as a
medium of international exchange will be lost. He should aim at fashioning out an
English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience. (433)
Things Fall Apart truly is a new voice that shares the African experience in English.
Importantly, he also presents a new English to the world. Achebe declares that he intends to use
the English language in his own way (434). He confidently declares: I feel that the English
language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new
English. (434) Things Fall Apart is a very good example of this new use of English.
Furthermore, Achebe has used the colonial language for writing back to the Empire. His
use of new English has successfully shown the reason of the falling apart of African culture,
showing the devil of colonization much more strongly than other writers. Chinua Achebes
Things Fall Apart reminds us of Frantz Fanons three stages of native writers using English as
their medium of writing. The final phase is the phase of Adept' 2 which Achebe has successfully
achieved in this particular novel. Frantz Fanon says in his essay named On National Culture:

The term has been taken from Peter Barrys Beginning Theory. All postcolonial literatures, it might be said, seem
to make this transition. They begin with an unquestioning acceptance of the authority of European modes and
with the ambition of writing works that will be masterpieces entirely in this tradition. This can be called the Adopt
phase of colonial literature, since the writers ambition is to adopt the form as it stands, the assumption being that

Chowdhury 49

Finally, in this third phase, which is called the fighting phase, the native, after having
tried to lose himself in the people and with the people; hence comes a fighting literature,
a revolutionary literature, and a national literature. During this phase a great many men
and women who up till then would never have thought of producing a literary work, now
that they find themselves in exceptional circumstancesin prison, with the Maquis or on
the eve of their executionfeel the need to speak to their nation, to compose the sentence
which expresses the heart of the people and to become the mouthpiece of a new reality in
action. (41)
Achebe has successfully participated in this third phase called Adept where he has created a
literature of combat or resistance. This is an example of writing back to the centre. In this way,
he has created a space for the national literature of Africa and other nations that Fanon asserts in
his essay:
It is only from that moment that we can speak of national literature. Here there is, at the
level of literary creation, the talking up and clarification of themes which are typically
nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on
the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat,
because it moulds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging
open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes
responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space.
(47)

Violence is a frequent phenomenon in post-colonial writings. On this issue Achebe is no

different from Naipaul. However, Naipaul has barely sought the reason behind the violence in
colonized countries. In the last chapter, we saw how he has actually blamed African peoples for
their violent nature, claiming that they are inherently violent. However, if we consider Fanon we
will find that violence and disorder are natural outcomes of repression. And violent outbursts are
a psychological phenomenon of a long repressed colonized soul. It is true for both individual as

it has universal identity. The second stage can be called the Adapt phase, since it aims to adapt European form of
African subject matter, thus assuming partial rights of intervention in the genre. In the final phase there is, so to
speak, a declaration of cultural independence whereby African writers remake the form of their own specification,
without reference to European norms. This might be called Adept phase, since its characteristic is the assumption
that the colonial writer is an independent adept in the form, not a humble apprentice, as in the first phase, or a
mere licensee, as in the second. (Peter Barry Beginning Theory)

Chowdhury 50

well as for the mass population of Africa. Pre-independent and post-independent periods of
Africa are marked by violent periods of emerging national consciousness. This transition period
is marked by frustration of alienated African identity. Because of capitalist colonialist
domination, they had been forced to adapt to western ideology based on Christianity, which was
posed in a direct opposition to paganism. As a result, a gap is created between past African
identities and present hybrid identity, creating a feeling of insecurity. Frantz Fanon in his The
Wretched of the Earth (1961) discusses the violence in a newly decolonized country in the first
chapter named Concerning Violence. He starts the chapter by saying: National Liberation,
national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may
be the headings used or the new formulas introduces, decolonization is always a violent
phenomenon (Fanon Wretched 27). Achebes Things Fall Apart is set in the colonial period
where violence is a natural outcome. On the other hand, Achebes novel named Man of the
people (1966) is set in the post-independent period of an African nation. Fanon can help us to
understand the violent psychology of both these periods. As Achebe describes in his book the
protagonist of the novel is an emerging intellectual of a post-colonial country. The reason of
violence in such a new born country can be understood through Fanons analysis:
Individualism is the first to disappear. The native intellectuals had learnt from his
masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had
hammered into the natives mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person
shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought.
Now the native who has the opportunity to return to the people during the struggle for
freedom will discover the falseness of this theory. (Fanon Wretched 36)
Though, Odili Samalu is not a person active in the struggle for freedom, he is an intellectual who
tries to stand against the corrupt rulers of his country. He is an educated man a totally different
identity from a traditional African person. In this regard we have to understand that ancient
Africa was always based on community rather than individual identity. Interestingly, the

Chowdhury 51

antagonist of the novel Mr. Nanga who was also a talented teacher had actually assimilated his
position by grabbing the oppressors position at a certain point in his political life. To quote
Fanon: In order to assimilate and to experience the oppressors culture, the native has had to
leave certain of his intellectual positions in pawn. These pledges include his adoption of the
forms of thought of the colonialist bourgeoisie (Fanon Wretched 38). Moreover, Fanon shows
how they behave like a common opportunist (Fanon Wretched 38). The portrayal of Mr. Nanga
the minister is that of a common opportunist who has taken the position of a bourgeois
oppressor, and who has now replaced the colonizers. The period of building national
consciousness is marked by violence as described by Fanon:
The colonized man will first manifest this aggressiveness which has been
deposited in his bones against his own people. This is the period when the niggers beat
each other up, and the police and magistrates do not know which way to turn when faced
with the astonishing waves of crime in North Africa. We shall see later how this
phenomenon should be judged. What the native is confronted with the colonial order of
things, he finds he is in a state of permanent tension. The settlers world is a hostile
world, which spurns the native, but at the same time it is a world of which he is envious.
We have seen that the native never cease to dream of putting himself in the place of the
settlernot of becoming the settler but of substituting himself for the settler. (Fanon
Wretched 41)
Fanon clearly mentions that in this stage, the native people will behave violently among
themselves as they desire to place themselves in the role of the settler. Another novel Man of
the People is based on a conflict between two individuals, Odili Samalu and Mr. Nanga. The
narrator Odili never liked the Minister and often criticized him. The narrator and his friend
discuss the Ministers girl-friend, who is to become his second wife:
. . .; that man has no conscience.
Just think of such a cultureless man going abroad and calling himself Minister of
Culture. Ridiculous. This is why the outside world laughs at us. (Achebe Man 23)

Chowdhury 52

The novel is constructed around personal rivalry and has an erotic tone. Moreover, it is a story of
Odilis revenge as the powerful minister takes away his girl-friend. Finally, he avenges himself
by winning over Mr. Nangas fiance. We can remember Fanon here: The natives muscular
tension finds outlet regularly in blood thirsty explosionsin tribal warfare, in feuds between
sects and in quarrels between individuals (Fanon Wretched 42). The novel is about the failure of
leadership in African as Chinua Achebe asserts in his essay named The Trouble with Nigeria:
The trouble with Nigeria is simply and squarely a failure of leadership. There is nothing
basically wrong with the Nigerian character. There is nothing wrong with Nigerian land
or climate or water or air or anything else. The Nigerian problem is the unwillingness or
inability of its leaders to rise to the responsibility, to the challenge of personal examples
which are the hallmarks of true leadership. (22)
Achebe is also answering Naipaul by asserting that failure of leadership is not an inherent
phenomenon of an African character. This is the result of a long history of repression. Fanon
further explains this violence:
This characteristic on the part of the nationalist political parties should be
interpreted in the light both of the make-up of their leaders and the nature of their
followings. . . . The native intellectual has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled
desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. He has used his aggressiveness to serve
his own individual interests. (Fanon Wretched 47)
In Man of the People, we see how Mr. Nanga the minister has abused his power for individual
interests. Also vivid in where the political leaders have to decide between adopting Western
modes or not. As one of the leaders says in the parliament:
. . . Our true leaders are not those intoxicated with their Oxford, Cambridge or Harvard
degrees degrees but those who speke the language of the people. Away with the
damnable and expensive university education which only alienated an African from his
rich and ancient culture and puts him above his people. . . . . (Achebe Man 4)
In the same line the prime minister says: . . . Never again must we entrust our destiny of Africa
to hybrid class of Western educated and snobbish intellectuals who will not hesitate to sell their
mothers for a mess of pottage . . . (Achebe Man 6). Individual rivalries and quarrels permeate

Chowdhury 53

every aspect of newly independent nation; and the repressed anger finds violent release, similar
to Fanons description:
. . . Yet I spite of the metamorphoses which the colonial regime imposes upon it in the
way of tribal or regional quarrels, that violence makes its way forward, and the native
identifies his enemy and recognizes all his misfortunes, throwing all the exacerbated
might of his hate and anger into this new channel. (Fanon Wretched 55-56)
And soon these new-born nations undergo utter chaos and can see no way out of colonial
disharmony: That is why in certain under-developed countries the masses forge ahead very
quickly, and realize two or three years after independent that they have been frustrated, that it
wasnt worth while fighting, and that nothing could really change. . .( Fanon Wretched 58-59).
These newly-born countries have a long history of colonialism and as a result: It is true to say
that independence has brought moral compensation to colonized peoples, and has established
their dignity. But they have not yet had time to elaborate a society, or to build up and affirm
values. (Fanon Wretched 64) At the individual level, the psychological parameter of repression
and irruption becomes paramount. As Fanon goes on to say: At the level of individuals,
violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair
and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. . . ., the people have the time to
see that the liberation has been the business of each and all and that the leader has no special
merit (Fanon Wretched 74). Fanon truly assumes the view of ex-colonizers: In plain words, the
colonial power says: since you want independence, take it and starve (Fanon Wretched 77).
Writers like Achebe illustrate this point as they create stories where the past and present are
connected, and the complex process of establishing national identity is delineated.

African patriarchal society is also put through examination in Chinua Achebes novels.
Their ways of worship and religion are strongly portrayed. In Arrow of God (1964) Achebe

Chowdhury 54

shows, as he also had done in Things Fall Apart, a picture of African culture as an identity with
its unique characteristics:
Ulu, I thank you for making me see another new moon. May I see it again and again. This
household may it be healthy and prosperous . . . And let our wives bear male children.
May we increase in numbers at the next counting of the villages so that we shall sacrifice
to you a cow, not a chicken as we did after the last New Yam feast. May children put their
fathers into the earth and not fathers their children. (Achebe Arrow 6)
In Arrow of God Achebe has portrayed Igbo culture in its totality, not excluding patriarchal
notions, such as the expectations and values attached to male children, who are only considered
as members of their village or community. His examination of Igbo culture is done on its own
terms, and its good and bad points judged within its own periphery. Thus the Ezeulu Chief Priest
of Ulu utters the inner beliefs of his clan in his prayer:
I see. Ezeulu had forgotten temporarily that the nearer stream, Ota, had been
abandoned since the oracle announced yesterday that the enormous boulder resting on
two other rocks as its source was about to fall and would take a softer pillow for its head.
Until the alusi who owned the stream and whose name it bore had been placated no one
would go near it. (Achebe Arrow 7)
More importantly he tries to show the ancient past of Africa in opposition to Orientalist
construction that eradicates that past. He has also outlined a history of the region as a story teller,
bringing to life the oral culture that permeates African conscience. As a result, there is no
mention of dates in their story telling:
In the past the six villages of were separated and worshipped different deity as a
result they were vulnerable to the soldiers of Abam: Then the hired soldiers of Abam
used to strike in the dead of night, set fire to the houses and carry men, women and
children into slavery. . . . The six villages then took the name of Umuaro, and the priest
of Ulu became their Chief Priest. From that day they were never again beaten by an
enemy. (Achebe Arrow 15)
This is the reason that history and myth blend in African writing. We can see a formation of
myth:
I know, he [Ezeulu] told them, my father said this to me that when out village
first came here to live the land belonged to Okperi. It was Okperi who gave us a piece of

Chowdhury 55

their land to live in. they also gave us their deitiestheir Udo and their Ogwugwu. But
they said to our ancestorsmark my wordsthe people of Okperi said to our fathers:
We give you not Udo but the son of Udo, and not Ogwugwu but the son of Ogwugwu.
This is the story as I heard it from my father. If you chose to fight a man for a piece of
farmland that belongs to him I shall have no hand in it. (Achebe Arrow 16)
The story does not only describe how history remains within a clan, but also describes how
ethics is derived. However, Western intellectuals do not accept this as a history. They will
always stress the point that Africa does not have a history and is therefore seen as devoid of
civilization. As Derek Walcott explains in his essay named The Muse of History:
These writers [classicists] reject the idea of history as time for its original concept as
myth, the partial recall of the race. For them history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse,
memory. Their philosophy, based on a contempt for historic time, is revolutionary, for
what they repeat to the New World is its simultaneity with the old. Their vision of man is
elemental, a being inhabited by presence, not a creature chained to his past. Yet the
method by which we are taught the past, the progress from motive to event, is the same
by which we read narrative fiction. In time every event becomes an exertion of memory
and is thus subject to invention. The farther the facts, the more history petrifies into myth.
Thus we grow older as a race, we grow aware that history is written, that it is a kind of
literature without morality, that in its actuaries the ego of the race is indissoluble and that
everything depends on whether we write this fiction through the memory of hero or of
victim. ( 370) [My Italics]
Similarly, in The River Between (1965) Ngugi Wa Thiongo at the very beginning of his novel as
an African narrator explains the setting in a mythic style to describe the history of the valley.
Giving a clear picture of the beginnings of civilization in that particular region:
It began long ago. A man rose in Makuyu. He claimed that Gikuyu and Mumbi
sojourned there with Murungu on their way to Mukuruwe wa Gathanga. As a result of
that stay, he said, leadership had been left to Makuyu. Not all the people believed him.
For had it not always been whispered and rumored that Gikuyu and Mumbi had stopped
at Kameno? And had not a small hill grown out of the soil on which they stood south of
Kameno? And Murungu had told them:
This land I give you, O man and woman. It is yours to rule and till, you and your
posterity.
The land was fertile. It was the whole of Gikuyu country from one horizon
embracing the heavens to the other hidden in the clouds. So the story ran in Kameno.
Spiritual superiority and leadership had been left there. (1-2)
This is the way how the narrating of dateless facts metamorphoses into myth. Myth is created
over a long period of time as Walcott mentions in his essay . . . Facts evaporate into myth. . .

Chowdhury 56

(Walcott 371). African writers show their origins as a different stream from European humanism
in order to draw out their own identities. As we saw in the essay The Muse of History:

They believe in the responsibility of tradition, but what they are in awe of is
not tradition, which is alert, alive, simultaneous, but of history, and the same is true of the
new magnifiers of Africa. For these their deepest loss is of the old gods, the fear that it is
worship which has enslaved progress. Thus the humanism of politics replaces religion.
They see such gods as part of the process of history, subjected like the tribe to cycles of
achievement and despair. Because the Old World concept of God is anthropomorphic, the
New Wold slave was forced to remake himself in His image, despite such phrases as
God is light, and in Him no darkness, and at this point of intersecting faiths the enslaved
priest surrender their power. But the tribe in bondage learned to fortify itself by cunning
assimilation of the religion of the Old World. What seemed to be surrender was
redemption. What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal. What seemed the death of
faith, was its rebirth. (Walcott, 373)

Achebe has shown how colonialism destroyed African culture. The arrow of God
represents the arrow of white colonial power, a symbol of the destructive power of the white
man. He goes beyond blaming colonization, to look at the violence that every society is subject
to:
One man said that Ezeulu had forgotten whether it was his father or his mother
who told him about the farmland. Speaker after speaker rose and spoke to the assembly
until it was clear that all the six villages stood behind Nwaka. Ezeulu was not the only
man of Umuaro whose mother had come from Okperi. But none of the others dared go to
his support. (Achebe Arrow 17-18)
Achebe tries to analyze this violent tendency and shows it through a property dispute that had not
been settled to everyones satisfaction:
What you should ask them, said the other companion who has spoken very little since
they set out, said the other companion who had spoken very little since they set out.
what they should tell us is why, if the land was indeed theirs, why they let us farm it and
cut thatch from it for generations after generations, until the white man came and
reminded them. (Achebe Arrow 20) [My Italics]

Chowdhury 57

The white mans advent into Africa acts as a catalyst into breaking the long history of harmony,
as white rule is established by breaking clan unity. The white man begins by creating this
atmosphere of dispute, and then sets himself as the arbitrator between the tribes and as the force
that can end war and violence and bring peace. . . . The next day, Afo, saw the war brought to a
sudden close. The white man, Wintabota, brought soldiers to Umoaro and stopped it. The story
of what these soldiers did in Abame was still told with fear, and so Umouaro made no effort to
resist but laid down their arms (Achebe Arrow 29). Moreover, the white humiliates the natives
and disarms them: The white man, not satisfied that he had stopped the war, had gathered all
the guns in Umouaro and asked the soldiers to break them in the face of all, except three or four
which he carried away. Afterwards he sat in judgment over Umuaro and Okperi and gave the
disputed land to Okperi. (Achebe Arrow 28). The role of white colonizers becomes clear
throughout Achebes narrative. It becomes self-searching as well stands as a counter discourse to
western Orientalism, which had squarely blamed African peoples for their present miserable
condition. And he has successfully shown that the harmony of African civilization was broken
down by the intruders.
Against Naipauls portrayal of the white man as peace bearer (The Masque of Africa, A
Bend in the River) Achebe uses the word pacification, thus questioning the while mans role.
The contrast between peace and pacification remains moot here.

The club was the old

Regimental Mess the army left behind when their work of pacification was done in these parts
and then moved on (Achebe Arrow 33). Achebe shows both the African as well as the
colonizers point of view:
Tony Clarke was dressed for dinner, although he still had more than an hour to go. . . .
They said it was a general tonic which one must take if one own was to survive in this
demoralizing country. . . . He was now reading the final chapter of The Pacification of the

Chowdhury 58

Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, by George Allen, which Captain Winterbottom had
lent him. (Achebe Arrow 33)
It reminds us of the tragic story of Okonkwo in Achebes novel Things Fall Apart. There is a
clear contrast between the reality of Africa and the colonizers mind set. They have never
considered Africans to be civilized, but have always thought of them as brutal, uncivilized and
pagan, using the pejorative term of

niggers to describe them. Captain Winterbottoms

confession equalizes all European colonizers:

. . . Look at the French. They are not ashamed to teach their culture to backward
races under their charge. Their attitude to the native rulers is clear. They say to him:
This land has belonged to you because you have been strong enough hold it. By the same
token it now belongs to us. If you are satisfied come out and fight us. What do we
British do? We flounder from one expedient to its opposite. We do not only promise to
secure old savage tyrants on their or more likely filthy animal skinswe not only do
that, but we now go out of our way to invent chiefs where there were none before. They
make ne sick. (Achebe Arrow 37)
More importantly Achebe has shown how the true story is changed or modified by white
discourse. They have entitled a conflict between two clans as a savage war. Moreover they
have established falsehood by denying the long African history of mutual trust and friendliness:
Though guns have a long and interesting history. The people of Okperi and their
neighbors, Umuaro, are great enemies. Or they were before I came into story. A big
savage war had broken out between them over a piece of land. This feud was made worse
by the fact that Okperi welcomed missionaries and government while Umuaro, on the
other hand, has remained backward. It was only in the last four or five years that any kind
of impression has been made there. . . . (Achebe Arrow 37-38) [My Italics]
Captain Winterbottoms voice is not merely an individual voice; Achebe shows that is the part of
the process of African representation by the whites. This is indeed the established European
hegemonic discourse, where history is metamorphosed to establish Africans as a brutal and
uncivilized community of people:
. . . One thing you must remember in dealing with natives is that like children they
are great liars. They dont lie simply to get out of trouble. Sometimes they would spoil a

Chowdhury 59

good case by a pointless lie. Only one mana kind of priest-king in Umuarowitnessed
against his own people. I have not found what it was, but I think he must have had some
pretty fierce taboo working on him. But he was a most impressive figure of a man.
(Achebe Arrow 39)
Africans, especially the elder wise men or old people are seen as stubborn who resist external
influences. Both in Achebes Arrow of God as well as in Ngugi Wa Thiongos The River
Between we have seen Ezeulu and Waiyakis father send their children to learn white mens
wisdom. They knew that white men have their power unequal to them as a result they realized
that they have to learn their magic:
. . . He (Ezeulu) was not sure what to make of it. At first he had thought that since
the white man had come with great power and conquest it was necessary that some
people should learn the way of his deity. That was why he had agreed to send his son,
Oduche, to learn the new ritual. He also wanted him to learn the white mans wisdom, for
Ezeulu knew from what he saw of Wintabota and the stories he heard about his people
that the white man was very wise. (Achebe Arrow 43)
Ezeulu as well as Chege knew that their world is changing abruptly so they need to change
themselves as well: The world is changing, he had told him. I do not like it. But I am like the
bird Eneke-nti-oba. . . . The world is like a mask dancing. If you want to see it well you do not
stand in place. My spirit tells me that those who do not befriend the white man today will be
saying had we known before (Achebe Arrow 47). In this way, Achebe shows that African
community never was a static community, changing as the time demands. However, colonizers
also change their strategy as they need to rule over their colonized land as we see in Arrow of
God:
Back at his desk Captain Winterbottom read the Lieutenant Governors memorandum
again:
My purpose in this paragraph is limited to impressing on all Political Officers working
among the tribes who lack Natural Rulers the vital necessity of developing without any
further delay an effective system of indirect rule based on native institutions.

Chowdhury 60

To many colonial nations native administration means government by white

men. You are all aware that H.M.G. considers this policy as mistake. In place of the
alternative of governing directly through Administrative offices there is the other method
of trying while we endeavor to purge the native system of its abuse to build a higher
civilization upon the soundly rooted native stock that had it foundation in the hearts and
minds of and thoughts of the people and therefore on which we can more easily build,
molding it and establishing it into lines consonant with modern ideas and higher
standards, and yet all the time enlisting the real force of the spirit of the people, instead of
killing all that out and trying to start afresh. We must not destroy the Africa atmosphere,
the African mind, the whole foundation of his race . . . (Achebe Arrow 57)
In this way, Achebe counteracts the accusation that African society is static and immune to
change, and becomes part of the counter discourse initiated through the negritude movement by
his predecessors.

Chowdhury 61

CHAPTER THREE
SYNTHESIS: RENUNCIATION

Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the
negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing
(Barthes1322).
In an era of post-modernity, writers and theorists play with techniques of narrative to
shift the focus from the narrator to the narrative itself. In the previous chapters, we observed the
conflict between Subject and Object as well as the representation and re-representation from both
points of view. Post-colonial writings show that these identifications are blurred so that one
identity cannot be separated from the other. This means the dominant ideology represented the
narrative voice is subverted and its perception of supremacy is somewhat compromised. In that
case, the narrators ideology or viewpoint gets more priority than the agent the narrator is
representing. Writers like J. M. Coetzee combine issues of post-colonialism and post-modernity
in their writing to demonstrate this point. In his novel, he dissolves the question of representation
by introducing Roland Barthes famous theory The Death of the Author. In this way, the
narrator is renouncing his or her authority to represent any particular identity only to give
language an autonomous identity.
Let us begin by looking briefly at Disgrace (1999) written in the context of the postcolonial period of South African post-apartheid. This novel shows a total change in the position
of subject and other in the context of South Africa. In Coetzees representation the position of
the blacks and whites are changing in the emerging situation in South Africa. In the novel we see
Professor David Lurie and his daughter Lucy in a position of the Other. This is indeed a new
departure. The professor is discharged from his university for having sexual relations with a

Chowdhury 62

student named Melaine after a complaint is filed by her to the university. He leaves Cape Town
and joins his daughter who lives in a rural area in a small farm. He helps her in farming and
selling her goods in the local market. However, his daughter is raped by three intruders in their
farm and he himself is badly injured by the attackers. Lucy does not mention being raped in her
complaint to the police which irritates the old professor. She wanted to carry on with her life in
the land peacefully. This ultimately creates a distance between the father and daughter. She
became pregnant as a result of the rape. This is highly disturbing especially when he finds out
that the three intruders were very close to their neighbor Petrus. Interestingly, Lucy does not
want to quarrel with Petrus; rather she decides to have the child and settle for a compromise with
the neighboring landlord. This is unacceptable to David. However, this story is not simply a story
of losing dignity but also of reversing the racial position. In the changed post-apartheid era South
Africa had to reverse its racial policies. This phenomenon can be understood through Fanons
psychological analysis in Black Skin, White Masks (1952), when the author shows how the native
desires to take the position of a colonizer in other words of a ruler or of a Subject. The repressed
desire of the native is evoked through the rape of Lucy. More interestingly, Lucy seems to take
the burden of the rape as she does not complain to the police. It seems that she takes the
responsibility of white repression or of bad doing of her earlier generations against the people of
Africa. Her father can also be accused of that wrong doing as he himself knew he had committed
A mistake, a huge mistake (Coetzee Disgrace 25). He had slept with his colored student and
apologizes to her family. Despite the change in position, there still remains Subject and Other
relationship between the two races. As a result, in Coetzees representation of Africa; we still see
a subject-object identity in the social structure. This does not invalidate Achebe and Naipauls

Chowdhury 63

representation of ambiguous hybrid African identity, but initiates a question of whether these two
identities will always remain separate.
J. M. Coetzees earlier novel Foe (1986) written as a parallel novel of Robinson Crusoe
(1719) by using post-modern techniques of inter-textuality, is most interesting in this context.
This novel is not obviously set in Africa and in no simple way we can connect this novel with the
title of this paper. However, if we take Friday as a metonymy for the black people, we can
connect the novel with the representation of Africa. Though, he is not the protagonist of this
novel his silence becomes one of the most important issues to the protagonist of the novel Susan
Barton, a female castaway in contrast to a colonial male castaway. This simple presence of
Friday or his silence connects the novel with Orientalist discourses that have constructed present
day Black identity. The female castaway reveals her story to an author named Foe in Britain who
converts her adventures into a popular fiction. Coetzee brings back Daniel Defoe (1660-1731) as
Mr Foe in his metafictional novel. Susans journey started for rescuing her abducted daughter.
She started her journey in a ship for Lisbon but during a mutiny she was sent adrift. There she
met Crusoe and Friday already living in the island for a long time. The said author refused to
take her story of the island, instead he chooses her story pursue for her daughter. Later Foes
writing process was distracted by the writers personal problems. However, Susan begins
narrating her own story and so a new voice comes into play:
I would now recount to you the history of this singular Crusoe, as I heard it from his own
lips. But the stories he told me were so various, and so hard to reconcile one with another,
that I was more and more driven to conclude age and isolation had taken their toll on his
memory, and he no longer knew for sure what was truth, what fancy.. . . But the next day
he would tell me he had been a poor lad [Friday] of no family who had shipped as a
cannibal boy and been captured by the Moors . . . and escaped and made his way to the
New World. (Coetzee Foe 11-12) [My Italics]

Chowdhury 64

Susan starts to narrate her story. More importantly, she states that she is recounting the story of a
singular Crusoe. Here, it is important to mention that the earlier story of Ronbinson Crusoe
was narrated through a male voice, while the same story is now recounted from a different and
female point of view. The change of point of view is important as in the Orientalist
representation Europe and the West are always represented as male or as a male voice and the
Other world is always represented as feminine. The novel is not only challenging the established
diagrams of earlier discourse but also tries to show that the story of the male castaway could be
narrated in another way. Another way of interpreting Foe is that it is not only a novel but also a
metafiction that is actually a criticism of Defoes Robinson Crusoe. At one point, Susan says :
With these words I presented myself to Robinson Crusoe, in the days when he still ruled over
his island, and became his second subject, the first being his manservant Friday (Coetzee Foe
11). This is an indication that Crusoe is not only a castaway but also a representative of the West
or Self; on the other hand, Friday is a representative of Africa or the Other. As there were no
female castaways, the voice of a female castaway had never been heard. Coetzee is conscious of
this phenomenon and is consciously giving a space to a female voice who claims her story to be
as exciting as Crusoes ones. In his further attempt, the novelist is also disclosing the technique
of creating an artifact or a fiction:
. . . he urged There has never before, to my knowledge, been a female castaway of our
nation. It will cause a great stir. . . . I replied; but what little I know of book-writing
tells me its charm will quite vanish when it is set down badly in print. . . . said Captain
Smith; but you may depend on it, the booksellers will hire a man to set your story to
rights, and put in a dash of color too, here and there. (Foe 40) [My Italics]
Susan questions the credibility of Crusoes claims about Friday, thereby questioning Robinson
Crusoe itself. It questions an established discourse which had portrayed Friday as a cannibal
without language or voice. Here in the novel it not only doubts the validity of the story but also

Chowdhury 65

challenges the concept of pure truth: Is that why you are forever looking out to sea: to be
warned of the return of the cannibals? I would pursue; and he would nod again. So in the end I
did not know what was truth, what was lies, and what was mere rambling (Coetzee Foe 12)
[My italics]. Susan is a voice that questions and continuously challenges the established Crusoe
myth trying to say that what Crusoe had said in original Robinson Crusoe may not be the only
truth. She always doubts Crusoes honesty:
you speak as if language were one of the banes of life, like money or the pox. Said I.
Yet would not have lightened your solitude had Friday been master of English? You and
he might have experienced, all these years, the pleasures of conversation; you might have
brought home to him some of the blessings of civilization and made him a better man.
What benefits is there in a life of silence? (Coetzee Foe 22)
These are actually questions to Daniel Defoe as the author of Robinson Crusoe. These questions
remain unanswered. However, Calibans consciousness regarding language is also visible here. It
tries to show that if the master teaches his language to his slave, the language can be used as a
weapon against the master as Caliban did against Prosparo. This metafictional novel tries to
criticize the intentional silencing of Friday. Fridays silence is not only the silence of a person
but also a silence of the Other world. In the absence of the voice of the Other, Crusoe can
imagine the world by himself. In this silencing process, Daniel Defoe has not left any space for
self-representation for Friday. On the other hand, his protagonist has all the freedom of
constructing the image of Friday. Susans is a voice that tends to deconstruct the idea of Friday
established through Crusoe or by Daniel Defoe. She constantly questions Fridays slaughtered
tongue:
Crusoe gazed steadily back at me. Though I cannot now swear to it, I believe he was
smiling. Perhaps the slavers, who are Moors, hold the tongue to be a delicacy, he said.
Or perhaps they grew weary of listening to Fridays wails of grief, which went on day
and night. Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story who he was,
where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken. Perhaps they cut out the tongue

Chowdhury 66

of every cannibal they took, as a punishment. How will we ever know the truth?
(Coetzee Foe 23)
The answer lies in this guessing. Nobody knows who Friday was and how his tongue was cut.
The truth could never be arrived at as Friday himself would never be able to narrate his side of
the story. Moreover, in Foe, Crusoe somehow accepts that slaves are necessary for prosperity
and civilization:
. . . Was providence sleeping?
If Providence were to watch over all of us, said Crusoe, who would be left to pick the
cotton and cut the sugar-cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must
sometimes wake and sometimes sleep as lower creatures do. (Coetzee Foe 23)
Crusoes words support slavery. In Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe is the only authority in the island.
Friday was his only subject. Everyone else has unquestioningly taken the story of the island as
told by the canonical author. However, Coetzee questions the authority of Crusoe; in other
words, the words of the fiction of Daniel Defoe. In Coetzees metafictional approach he does not
only reveal a crafting process of a fiction behind a renowned colonial novel but also question the
authority of a castaway through the medium of the voice of a female castaway:
. . . When I reflect on my story I seem to exist only as the one who has came, the one who
witnessed, the one who longed to be gone: a being without substance, a ghost beside the
true body of Crusoe. Is that the fate of all storytellers? Yet I was as much a body as
Crusoe. I ate and drunk, I woke and slept, I longed. The island was Crusoes (yet by what
right? By the law of islands? Is there such a law? (Coetzee Foe 51)
Susans story does not attract a writer like Foe as she confesses: I am not persuaded, despite
Crusoes fear, that there are cannibals in those oceans. . . . All I say is: What I saw, I wrote. I saw
no cannibals; and if they came after nightfall and fled before the dawn, they left no footprint
behind (Coetzee Foe 54). A fiction or a narrative always needs elements of excitement to give it
a flavor of adventure. Susans island is no such island. Coetzee shows how a story evolves with

Chowdhury 67

the inclusion of imagination, how a piece of imagination becomes a myth, how a mere work of
pastime of Crusoe and Friday can once be misunderstood:
. . . In a year, in ten years, there will be nothing left standing but a circle of sticks to mark
the place where the hut stood, and of the walls they will say, these are cannibal walls, the
ruins of a cannibal city, from the golden age of the cannibals. For who will believe they
were built by one man and a slave, in the hope that one day a seafarer would come with a
sack of corn for them to sow? (Coetzee Foe 55)
Susans island is not an exotic one. However, elements of fiction need to be exiting and exotic as
it is usually seen in Oriental representation. Gradually, as a metafictional approach Coetzee is
revealing the technique of writing fiction:
Yes, I would pursue, If we were nearer the heavens there, why was it that so little of
the island could be called extraordinary? Why were there no strange fruits, no serpents,
no lions? Why did the cannibals never come? What will we tell folk in England when
they ask us to divert them? (Coetzee Foe 43)
Susans experience does not contain the elements of a fictional plot. This is another attempt by
Coetzee to show the difference between a real life condition and a fiction as description. A real
life experience often lacks what is expected in a fictional work. More importantly, a fictional
work has a structure and needs to be shaped accordingly. It has a beginning, middle and end.
However, post-modern approach has actually deconstructed the idea of structuralism instead it
focuses on the idea of deconstruction where structure is challenged and deconstructed.
Coetzee repeatedly stresses on the silence of Friday and the absence of his tongue.
Coetzee cunningly raises the question of history, where the whole truth is never told. By relating
this to fiction, fiction is shown to become a discourse which fulfills the relationship between
narrative and power: . . . But what we can accept in life we cannot accept in history. To tell my
story and be silent on Fridays tongue is no better than offering a book for sale with pages in it
quietly left empty. Yet the tongue that can tell Fridays secret is the tongue he has lost! (Coetzee

Chowdhury 68

Foe 67) Coetzee in Dusk Land (1974) quotes from Flaubert who was regarded as one of the
pioneer Orientalist by Edward Said: What is important is the philosophy of History (Coetzee
Dusk 1). In history, the silencing of voices is not new as colonial history writers always did in
their historic writings. Coetzee in his metafictional approach tries to unfold the philosophy of
history that has been constructed through European orientalist discourse.
In post-modern writings writers tend to reveal that fiction is an artifact and words are
materials of this art work. It works as a magic. Coetzee does the same thing in his novel by
showing that the novel is not only an art work but also a product of capitalist society that can
also make a writer a popular and rich one:

This is the part of the magic of words. Through the

medium of words I have given Mr Foe the particulars of you and Mr. Crusoe and of my year on
the island . . . Mr. Foe is weaving into a story which will make us famous throughout the land,
and rich too (Coetzee Foe 58). In his rhetorical questioning he tries to find out the reason
behind writing . . . is writing not a fine thing? (Coetzee Foe 58). Is writing a mere work of art?
Said has already stated the argument that no knowledge is pure knowledge. This approach shows
that writing is not only a personal matter or a personal view of a writer. Moreover, behind any
kind of writing there is a process:
It is not wholly as I imagined it would be. What I thought would be your writing-table is
not a table but a bureau. The window overlooks not woods and pastures but your garden.
There is no ripple in the glass. The chest is not a true chest but a dispatch box.
Nevertheless, it is all close enough. Does it surprise you as much as it does me, this
correspondence between things as they are and the pictures we have of them in our
minds?( Coetzee Foe 65) [My Italics]
In this way, Coetzee tries to uncover the process of writing fiction. A bureau is not a personal
place moreover it is a public space where officials and the public interact.

Chowdhury 69

Elements of fiction are not available in Susans story even as she lists the strange
circumstances of her journey. However, it seems to her not as exciting as it should be. As a
result, she tries to invent some strange stories and includes those in her story as fact:
. . . Then I made a list of all the strange circumstances of the year I could
remember: the mutiny and murder on the Portuguese ship, . . . Dubiously I thought: Are
these enough strange circumstances to make a story of? How long before I am driven to
invent new and stranger circumstances: the salvage of a boat, or at last, the coming of a
golden-haired stranger . . . Alas, will the day ever arrive when we can make a story
without strange circumstances? (Coetzee Foe 67)
Now, Susan understands why Mr. Foe was interested in the word Cannibal. Mr. Foe needs
excitement in the story of Susana. He needs to make the fiction exciting and adventurous to his
readers:
Alas, we will never make our fortunes, Friday, by being merely what we are, or
were. Think of the spectacle we offer: your master and you on the terraces. . . .Who
would wish to read that there were once . . . We begin to understand why Mr. Foe pricked
up his ears when he heard the word Cannibal, why he longed for Crusoe to have a musket
and a carpenters chest. No doubt he would have preferred Crusoe to be younger too, and
his sentiments towards me more passionate. (Coetzee Foe 83)
Among the invented stories the stories of a savage or cannibal seems to be most exiting for a
reader.
In The Death of the Author Roland Barthes (1967) indicates annihilation of the identity
of a writer. He writes: Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips
away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing
(1322). Though the representation of Africa by three authors examined in this thesis actually
differs in perspective, they all portray hybrid conditions where a clear line between Self and
Other is blurred. As a result, Coetzee employs a different approach in representation. Coetzee
begins where both Achebe and Naipaul end . . ., the disconnection occurs, the voice loses its

Chowdhury 70

origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins (1322). In the essay Barthes
empowers the readers. He stresses on the point that meaning will be absorbed by the reader:
The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up writing are inscribed
without any of them being lost; a texts unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.
Yet this destination cannot any longer be personal: the reader is without history,
biography, psychology; he is simply someone who holds together in a single field all the
traces by which the written text is constituted. (1325)
As a result Coetzee is also asking what will be asked by the readers in a novel. He is more
interested in what a reader can ask about a text. In his post-modern approach he asks: I ask
these question because they are the questions any reader of our story will ask. . . Is the answer
that our island was not a garden of desire, like that in which our first parents went naked, and
coupled as innocently as beast? (Coetzee Foe 86) Coetzee is challenging already established
issues in the original Robinson Crusoe. It is important to remember here that this questioning is
serving two purposes; firstly, questioning a grand narrative as a characteristic of post-modern
metafictional writing and secondly, this is a voice of a reader more importantly a post-modern
reader conscious of the theory of deconstruction. A conscious reader will obviously question the
validity of Crusoes remarks in the original text of Robinson Crusoe:
. . . There was too little desire in Crusoe and Friday: too little desire to escape, too
little desire for a new life. Without desire how is it possible to make a story? It was an
island of sloth, despite the terracing. I ask myself what past historians of the castaways
state have donewhether in despair they have not begun to make up lies? (Coetzee Foe
88) [My Italics]
In other words, he is also questioning Daniel Defoes construction of a fiction which is obviously
a work of crafting. In his further attempt, Coetzee describes the craft of writing or a process of
creating an art work that is described in post-modern literature as techniques of metafictionality.
In Foe, he tries to reveal Robinson Crusoe as a work of art, or as an artifact:

Chowdhury 71

Teasing and braiding can, like any craft, be learned. But as to determining which
episodes hold promise (as oysters hold pearls), it is not without justice that this art is
called diving. Here the writer can of himself effect nothing: he must wait in the grace of
illumination. Had I known, on the island, that it would one day fall to me to be our
storyteller, I would have been more zealous to interrogate Crusoe. . . (Coetzee Foe 89)
Coetzee describes the poetics of fiction as Aristotle did in his Poetics. He is blending the
techniques of fiction and non-fiction: It is thus that we make up a book: loss, then quest, then
recovery; beginning, then middle, then end (Coetzee Foe 117). In other words, Coetzee agrees
with Barthes view that no writing is original, and every writer takes from his or her
predecessors. When, Mr. Foe rejects Susans story of the island, she questions and analyses her
own version of the story:
. . . The story I desire to be known by is the story of the island. You call it an
episode, but I call it a story in its own right. It commences with my being cast away there
and conclude s with the death of Crusoe and the return of Friday and myself to England, .
. . Taken in all, it is a narrative with a beginning and an end, and with pleasing
digressions too, lacking only a substantial and varied middle, in the place where Crusoe
spent too much time tilling the terraces an I too much time tramping the shores. Once
you proposed to supply a middle by inventing cannibals and pirates. These I would not
accept because they were not truth. Now you propose to reduce the island to an episode
in the history of a woman in search of a lost daughter. This too I reject. (Coetzee Foe
121)
In the novel, a girl suddenly arrives and claims to be the lost daughter of Susan. However, this
small anecdote also used as a specimen of how a story can be crafted by a writer:
I have brought you to tell you of your parentage, I commence. I do not know
who told you that your father was brewer from Deptford who fled to the Low Countries,
but the story is false. Your father is a man named Daniel Foe. He is the man who set you
to watching the house in Newington. Just as it was he who told you I am your mother, I
will vouch he is the author of the story of the brewer. He maintains whole regiments in
Flanders.. . . . I repeat: what you know of your parentage comes to you in the form of
stories, and the stories have but a single source. (Coetzee Foe 90-91)
A writer is not only a writer but also a father or a breeder of a story. Another important issue
included here is in that general readers tend to believe a well crafted story. They are quite

Chowdhury 72

convinced that it is a true story that has been told to them. However, here Coetzee tries to reveal
that there are other possibilities of a story. Barthes stresses the point that no writing is original
one. As Coetzee takes Robinson Crusoe as his primary text on which his Foe is recrafted,
Barthes says in his famous essay on the trend of post-modern literature:
. . . ,none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from
the innumerable centres of culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet, those eternal
copyist, at once sublime and comic and whose profound ridiculousness indicates
precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior,
never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the once with the others, in
such a way as never to rest on any of them. (1324)
In the same process Coetzee finds how in representation one part remains silent or unspoken.
This is the basis on which the image of the subject or the protagonist is constructed:
In every story there is a silence, some sight concealed, some world unspoken, I believe.
Till we have spoken the unspoken we have not come to the heart of the story. I ask: why
was Friday drawn into such deadly peril, given that life on the island was without peril,
given that life on the island was without peril, and then saved? . . . We are accustomed to
believe that our world was created by God speaking the worry; but I ask, may it not rather
be that he wrote it, wrote a word so long we have yet to come to the end of it? May it not
be that God continually writes the world, the world and all that is in it? (Coetzee Foe
141-143)

Absence of the writer (Mr. Foe) is very important in the second part of the novel. It is his
absence that makes the protagonist writes about her life as a castaway. It is an echo of the theory
of The Death of the Author as well. A writer should not be present after the creation of a text.
He or she should be absent as it happens in Foe. For example, in this novel; Susan is a symbolic
conscious post-modern reader who converts herself into a writer or a critic. Though she wants to
remain true to her story, she herself doubts whether her story which is non-adventurous, nonromantic and with no cannibals is a story at all. Silencing of the voice is repeatedly questioned in
the novel. The narrator constantly asks the question who is responsible for cutting off Fridays

Chowdhury 73

tongue? In her continuous questioning she actually doubts Crusoe: Have I misjudged Crusoe all
this time: was it to punish him for his sins that he cut out Fridays tongue?(Coetzee Foe 95)
Coetzee doubts the original Robinson Crusoe in his metafictional approach. This is the doubt of
a conscious post-modern reader who doubts the fixity of meaning in a discourse:
. . . It is as though animalcules of words lie dissolved in your ink-well, ready to be
dipped up and flow from the pen and take form on the paper. From down stairs to
upstairs, from house to island, from the girl to Friday: it seems necessary only to establish
the poles, the here and the there, the now and the thenafter the words of themselves do
the journeying. I had not guessed it was so easy to be an author. (Coetzee Foe 93)
She continues her writing as a letter to Mr. Foe. She questions him directly about the honestly in
his writing. She is aware of the fact that writing is a difficult job and a writer should be conscious
about using proper techniques and words in the proper places in the crafting of a piece of fiction.
She knows a writer sometimes has to insert exotic as well as erotic elements in a work of art.
Undoubtedly, here arises the eternal confusion of whether art is for art sake or should an art work
also concentrate on real life. The conflict is reflected in the novel:
Dear Mr Foe,
. . . I thought it was a sign you had no regard for the truth. I forgot you are a
writer who knows above all how many words can be sucked from a cannibal feast, how
few from a woman cowering from the wind. It is all a matter of words and the number of
words, is it not? (Coetzee Foe 94)
Friday is silent as silence becomes a tool for resistance for him. In Susans view silence is a way
to reject the West. Moreover, the novel criticizes the silencing of Fridays voice in Robinson
Crusoe. It seems that Fridays voice was muted deliberately to give complete space to Crusoe.
This is why Coetzee questions the deliberate silencing of Friday through the voice of Susan: In
the letters you did not read, I said, I told you of my conviction that, if the story seems stupid,

Chowdhury 74

that is only because it so doggedly holds its silence. The shadow whose lack you feel is there: it
is the loss of Fridays tongue. (Coetzee Foe 118). The writer does not answer:
Foe made no reply, and I went on. The story of Fridays tongue is a story unable
to be told, or unable to be told by me. That is to say, many stories can be told of Fridays
tongue, but the true story will not be heard till by art we have found a means of giving
voice to Friday. . . listening to the pulse of blood in my ears and to the silence from
Friday below, a silence that rose up the stairway like smoke, like a welling of black
smoke. Before long I could not breathe. . . (Coetzee Foe 118)
In the novel, Susan continues her investigation about Fridays lost tongue. In her further
attempts, she tries to find out the truth by sketching three sketches and by showing it to Friday
because she thinks that there is still a gap between her and Friday: Ah Friday! I said.
Shipwreck is a great leveler, and so is destitution, but we are not level enough yet. (Coetzee
Foe 70) A sense of desire plays an important role in the relationship between Susan and Friday.
She desires to know the secrets of Fridays silence.
Oh, Friday, how can I make you understand the cravings felt by those of us who live in a
world of speech to have our questions answered! It is like our desire, when we kiss
someone, to feel the lips like our desire, to feel the lips we kiss respond to us. . . . I say
that the desire for answering speech is like the desire for the embrace of, the embrace by,
another being. (Coetzee Foe 79-80)
Most of the time it is one sided as Susan confirms. Neither Friday nor Crusoe desired her: . . .
Why did you not desire me, neither you nor your master? . . . Do tall women who rise up out of
the sea dismay you? (Coetzee Foe 85) The question whether Friday loves the woman is an
important issue in the novel. It seems that the narrator had a kind of weakness towards Friday. It
is not only that he is silenced but he has also been unmanned. The issue is focused on by the
narrator: Whether the lost tongue might stand not only for itself but for a more atrocious
mutilation; whether by a dump slave I was to understand a slave unmanned (Coetzee Foe 119).
This gives a sudden realization to Susan: . . . I was so confounded that I gaped without shame at

Chowdhury 75

what had hitherto been veiled from me. For though I had seen Friday naked before, it had been
only from a distance: on our island we had observed the decencies as far as we could, Friday not
least of us (Coetzee Foe 119). Instead of his silence he remains an African and he protects his
identity of being an African: In the dance nothing was still and yet everything was still. The
whirling robe was a scarlet bell settled upon Fridays shoulders and enclosing him; Friday was
the dark pillar at its centre. What had been hidden from me was revealed. I saw; or I should say,
my eyes were to open to what was present to them (Coetzee Foe 119). Friday remains African
at his core as a result he does not have any desire to learn what Susan intends to teach him.
Whether, the West or Daniel Defoe can label Friday as a cannibal or as a slave Friday remains
what he is:
So now I knew that all the time I had stood there playing to Fridays dancing, thinking he
and I made a consort, he had been insensible of me. And indeed, when I stepped forward
in some pique and grasped at him to halt the infernal spinning, he seemed to feel my
touch no more than if it had been a flys; . . . and his soul more in Africa than in
Newington. Tears came to my eyes, . . . and bitterly I began to recognize that it might not
be mere dullness that kept him shut up in himself, not the accident of the loss of his
tongue, nor even an incapacity to distinguishing speech from babbling, but a disdain for
intercourse with me. Watching him whirling in his dance, I had to hold back an urge to
strike him and tear the wig and robes away and thus rudely teach him he was not alone in
this earth. (Coetzee Foe 98)
Finally, Susan or a conscious reader realizes that Friday has always been an African soul and
will never be a part of Crusoes world: . . .And in that same instant I understood why Friday
had danced all day in your house: It was to remove himself, or his spirit from Newington and
England, and from me too. For was it to be wondered at that found life with me as burdensome
as I found life with him? (Coetzee Foe 94)
Now another important question that emerges in the novel is whether Susan really desires
Friday. Or, why does she want to communicate with Friday? Or it is just her desire of to teach

Chowdhury 76

Friday and make him a civilized human being. In the novel, she has always used the symbol of
love making. Jenny Sharpe in her essay named Figure of Colonial Resistance says:
Arguing against the fixity of essentialist signification that Saids study of
Orientalism suggests, Bhabha proposes a mixed economy of not only power and
domination but also desire and pleasure. He describes mimicry as a trope of partial
presence that masks a threatening racial difference only to reveal the excesses and
slippages of colonial power and knowledge. The menace of mimicry, he explains, is its
double vision which in disclosing the ambivalence of colonial discourse also disrupts its
authority (Bhabha 1984b:129). The movement between fixity of signification and its
division, what he calls the ambivalence of colonial discourse, demonstrates that colonial
authority is never total or complete. And it is this absence of a closure that allows for
native intervention. (101)
Susan strives to know Fridays inner being. This can be connected with the essence of desire and
pleasure. This is also an indication that though Susan is a female voice still she is a voice from
the West as a result she is not also devoid of having desire of possessing Fridays knowledge.
In earlier discourse of Orientalism, the concept of cannibalism has been established so
vividly that it cannot be eliminated easily from a readers mind. As a result, Susan is in a
dilemma that in her unconscious mind she still tends to believe that Friday could be a cannibal
who can eat the dead child:
Who was the child but I, in another life?. . . My thought ran to Friday, I could not
stop them, it was an effect of the hunger. Had I not been there to restrain him, would he
in his hunger have eaten the babe? I told myself I did him wrong to think of him as a
cannibal or worse, a devourer of the dead. But Crusoe had planted the seed in my mind,
and now I could not look on Fridays lips without calling to mind what meat must once
have passed them. (Coetzee Foe 106) [My Italics]
She imagines Friday as a cannibal who could eat her at any time and as a result she could not
sleep. It resembles Fanons psychological explanation in the chapter named The Negro and
Psychology in his book Black Skin White Masks:

Chowdhury 77

In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the savage are always
symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the
little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes and explorer, and adventurer,
a missionary who faces the danger being eaten by the wicked Negroes. (113)
Representing a Negro is an old trend that ultimately shapes the psychology of the modern readers
who are expected to believe that the Negro is a cannibal. Very soon Coetzee gives his readers a
hint that the concept is actually gained by books such as Pakenhams Travels in Abyssinia
(1737). It is important to understand that Susans knowledge has actually derived from such kind
of discourse that makes her doubt about Friday though she never have experienced any prove of
Fridays brutality that can prove him as a cannibal: . . . though glad to be relieved of so heavy a
book, I was sorry too, for I had no time to read in it and learn more of Africa, and so be of great
assistance to Friday in regaining his homeland (Coetzee Foe 107).
Rejection is an important element of resistance as Foe shows. The rejection is directed to
the original text of Robinson Crusoe because it challenging its narrative. Coetzee says that
Crusoes voice was actually a voice from the West:
You err most tellingly in failing to distinguish between my silence and the
silences of a being such as Friday. Friday has no command of words and therefore no
defense against being re-shaped day by day on conformity with the desires of others. I
say he is a cannibal and he becomes a cannibal; I say he is a laundryman and he becomes
a laundryman. What is the truth of Friday? You will respond: he is neither cannibal not
laundryman, these are mere names, they do not touch his essence, he is a substantial
body, he is himself, Friday is Friday. But that is not so. No matter what he is to himself
(is he anything to himself?-how can he tell us?), what us to the world is what I make of
him. Therefore the silence of Friday is a helpless silence. . . . Whereas the silence I keep
regarding Bahia and other matters is chosen and purposeful: it is my own silence.
(Coetzee Foe 121-22) [My Italics]
Friday is shaped by the intentions of Daniel Defoe who has the authority over language and as a
result has shaped Fridays voice. Discourse is not a single voice but a collection of voices crafted

Chowdhury 78

over the period of time as Foucault explains in Archeology of Knowledge (1969). Susan is the
anti-voice of Crusoe. She intends to amend what had once been established:
I am not, do you see, one of those thieves or highwaymen of yours who gabble a
confession and are then whipped off to Tyburn and eternal silence, leaving you to make
of their stories whatever you fancy. It is still in my power to guide and amend. Above all,
to withhold. By such means do I still endeavor to be father to my story. (Coetzee Foe
123)
In the original Robinson Crusoe both feminine and African voices were ignored. In that
particular novel most of time Friday was also treated as substantial body. He was treated as a
body without a specific identity. He was used as a vehicle for the West for establishing their
supremacy. His identity was not only distorted but also shaped as a non-identity who does not
have any dignity: substantial body is an identity without dignity and self-respect: . . . I could
return in every respect to the life of a substantial body, the life you recommended. But such a life
is abject. It is the life of a thing. A whore used by men is used as a fore the substantial body
(Coetzee Foe 126). This substantial body is Susan as well as Friday. The identity of Friday has
been used by western discourse as a substantial body or a whore who served his master. In this
way, Coetzee is not only pointing to Robinson Crusoe but also to colonial discourse as a whole.
Coetzee in his metafictional approach empowers both muted African voices as well as
feminine voices. He reminds his readers about the story of the muse who was female and is
always an inspiration for writers. She is the one who begets creativity:
Do you know the story of the Muse, Mr. Foe? The Muse is a woman, a goddess,
who visits poets in the night and begets stories upon them. . . . When I wrote my memoir
for you, and saw how like the island it was, under my pen, dull and vacant and without
life, I wished that there were such a being as a man-Muse, a youthful god who visited
authoresses in the night and made their pens flow. But now I know better. The muse is
both goddess and begetter. I was intended not to be the mother of my story, but to beget
it. It is not I who am the intended, but you. (Coetzee Foe 126)

Chowdhury 79

As Barthes also describes about a creator of a story: The author is thought to nourishing the
book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives for it, is in the same relation of
antecedence to his work as a father to his child (1324). The whole novel is narrated from a
womans point of view. She is the sole narrator of the narrative. And through her voice Coetzee
raises the question of silencing. An important contrast in my paper is that in this final chapter the
novel I picked is actually described from a white narrator and its setting is also not in Africa.
However, I have picked it because it has actually focused on the issue of silencing a Negro slave.
It is also important that the narrator is actually condemning Defoe for the silencing of Friday.
Finally, Coetzee discloses the reason for silencing Friday. Friday is silenced because he can be
used by his master as he wished to: . . . We deplore the barbarism of whoever maimed him, yet
have we, his later masters, not reason to be secretly grateful? For as long as he is dumb we can
tell ourselves his desires are dark to us, and continue to use him as we wish(Coetzee Foe 148).
Moreover, as Helen Tiffin in Post-colonial Literature and Counter-discourse mentions
Coetzees Foe as a novel that has taken Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe as a primary text. She
says that Coetzees rewriting is a canonical counter-discourse. Coetzee in this novel is not only
using metafictional techniques to untie established discourses of Europe about the Other but also
indicates deliberate silencing of the voice of the Other:
Post-colonial cultures are inevitably hybridized, involving a dialectical
relationship between European ontology and epistemology and the impulse to create or
recreate independent local identity. . . Decolonisation is a process, not arrival; it invokes
an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist systems and peripheral subversion of
them; between Europe or British discourses and their post-colonial dismantling . . . , it
has been the project of post-colonial writing to interrogate European discourses and
discursive strategies from a privileged position within (and between) two worlds; to
investigate the means by which Europe imposed and maintained its codes in the colonial
domination of so much of the rest of the world. (Tiffin 99)

Chowdhury 80

Thus the rereading and rewriting of European historical and fictional records are vital. Writers
like Coetzee deconstruct colonial text to initiate a counter-discourse:
But the particular counter-discursive post-colonial field with which I want to
engage here is what Ill call canonical counter-discourse. . .
Understandably, then, it has become the project of post-colonial literatures to
investigate the European textual capture and containment of colonial and post-colonial
space and to intervene in that originally and continuing containment. . .Just as Jean Rhys
writes back to Charlotte Brontes Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea, . . .and J. M. Coetzee
in Foe (and indeed throughout his works) write back to Daniel Defoes Robinson Cruseo.
. . . Selvon and Coetzee take up the complex discursive field surrounding Robinson
Crusoe and unlock these apparent closures. (Tiffin 100-101)
Thus she finally concludes her essay by saying: . . . and J. M. Coetzee in Foe (and indeed
throughout his works) write(s) back to Daniel Defoes Robinson Crusoe (Tiffin 101).
Finally, we can conclude by saying that it is not only Friday who is used as a metonymy
of Other world, but also Crusoe who is a castaway is as well a metonymy for West in Coetzees
Foe. In this novel, Coetzee deconstructed Crusoe as well as Daniel Defoe who was reincarnated
by Coetzee in Foe as Mr. Foe by possessing a counter-discourse of canonical colonial writings.
In a post-modern era of hybridity where it is very difficult to draw a line between a subject and
object for a particular character of a fiction; Coetzee raises the question of the validity of a
fiction by dismantling its crafting process in his metafictional novel. In Disgrace he shows that
situation can change or alter the position of subject and object. In his further approach, he shows
that a position of self and other is conditional and constructed by and through a discourse.
However, a discourse or a language cannot be questioned for that, rather as Barthes explains, it
should be deconstructed and challenged by its reader to initiate an era of post-modernity where
discourse should be challenged by a counter-discourse.

Chowdhury 81

CONCLUSION

If we consider the progress of history in the way of Hegelian dialectic, we will see it resembles
the structural process in the history of representation discussed in this thesis. V. S. Naipaul could
not break the structure of the colonial trend of representation as a result his narratives can be
considered as a thesis of the Hegelian dialectical process. He represents Africa from an
Orientalist point of view in post-colonial writings. As a result, his narrative process is viewed as
the thesis in this paper in my first chapter. In the Hegelian dialectic apparatus, Chinua Achebe
challenges the previous Orientalist structure by re-representing African identity in post-colonial
writing. He breaks the structure of earlier discourse as a result he is viewed as an antithesis of
Naipauls representational writing. Finally, as history develops according to Hegelian dialectical
process J. M. Coetzee synthesized the way of representation by renouncing view of
representations that puts the author in the centre. He deconstructs the discourse itself and opens a
horizon of unlimited possibilities in the meaning of the discourse that ultimately turns the history
of representation to a totally new direction.

Chowdhury 82

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