The African Novel: The Confrontation of Mary GauntAuthor(s): Martin TuckerSource: Africa Today, Vol. 11, No. 8 (Oct., 1964), pp. 9-11Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184559 .

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The African NovelTwo

27MThe Confrontation

) ~of Mary Gafunt

~~~~~~~Martin Tucker

FEWER NOVELS IN ENGLISH about West Africa have been published in the twentieth century than about

other areas of Africa. This surprising statement re- mains true even when one takes into account the surg- ing renaissance of Nigerian writers-Chinua Achebe, Onuora Nzekwu, Cyprian Ekwensi, Amos Tutuola, among others. With the exception of Joyce Cary, and these new African writers who have been appearing since 1950, the area comprising Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia, the Cameroons, and Portuguese Guinea has not had much representation in English fiction. Grabam Green's The Heart of the Matter is placed in Sierra Leone on the West African coast, but, as Greene says, Africa for him is not one particular place but a gigantic condition of the heart. A great many reasons suggest themselves for the curious situ- ation that the richest and most industrialized area between North and South Africa, the most literate and Europeanized country produces less English liter- ature than the Congo and the East Coast. The expla- nation may lie in the fact that West Africa is domi- nated by French culture; and the vast number of Af- rican books-poetry, drama, and short stories, par- ticularly-testify to this dominance. Nigeria is an outpost of British influence but only an outpost. Thus, while the dramatic material has been everpresent, the English writer, when he was looking for a typical picture of British and native life in Africa, has in the past turned more east and south than west. Ni-

geria, now the most important source of literature by African writers, was by 1950 past the stage of primi- tivism and thus unattractive to the popular writers on Africa looking for exoticism and savagery. The country, unlike South Africa, was not in the midst of a war of human attrition, and the tragedies that in- spired such fine fiction as "Cry the Beloved Country" and "God's Stepchildren" failed to find root here until recently. But the basic reason may be that Nigeria, in preparing herself for independence, was and is! so dedicated to learning the more practical attitudes of government and business that little time has been allotted to fostering literature. Even this past year, the most prolific and popular writer in Nigeria, Cyp- rian Ekwensi, has forsaken the writing of novels to accept the post of Director of Information for his government. Whatever the reasons, the irony is mani- fest. Today, the newest, most vital indigenous literary movement in Africa springs from a region which lay fallow for nearly two decades. Even in South African literature, that of the whites (Sarah Gertrude Millin, Nadine Gordimer, Dan Jacobson, and Alan Patok) is pale beside this black outpouring.

Five major themes dominate the West African nov- el. They are the slave trade; the tragicomedy of ad- ministration by the British (Joyce Cary and his

MARTIN TUCKER is in the English Department of Long Island University. This is the second of a series on the African Novel.

OCTOBER 1964 9

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followers) ; politics of violence and sadism (exempli- fied by John Wyllie's "Riot") ; despair and moral crisis (the supreme example of which is Graham Greene's "The Heart of the Matter") ; and the con- frontation of African and European civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century. One early novel, "The Uncounted Cost" by Mary Gaunt, utilizes the old-fashioned humanitarian approach, but in its un- dertones of guilt and anxiety reflects the modern Eng- lish literary approach to West Africa.

Until 1932, when Joyce Cary published the first of his Nigerian novels, most of the novels about West Africa were romantic thrillers, which have their vogue in every age. If they lacked verisimilitude, they did not lack a sympathetic hold on the popular imagi- nation. Until the late 1940s, Africa was still dark enough to be both the bogeyman and the baby doll of the European's fantasies, fantasies that he could carry with him even when he was awake and that he did not need to test against reality. But if Africa was a fan- tasy to many writers and readers, it was also a mirror that reflected basic conditions of man, and the writers who saw these conditions were unanimous in their protest. Conrad and his attack on the imperialist ven- ture in Central Africa are well-known. Not so well- known is a woman who cried out just as passionately, though not so magnificently. In her autobiographical narrative "Alone in West Africa" (London, 1912), Mary Gaunt states she could have gone to live with her parents in a comfortable small Australian town after her husband died, but she preferred the dangers of independence as a free-lance writer in London. After reading tales of traders and adventurers in West Africa, Miss Gaunt fell in love with the region, and much like the nine-year-old Conrad who placed a pin in the Congo on a wall map and said that was the place he was going to see some day, she vowed she would get to the land of gold dust, crumbling forts, ivory, and palm oil. In London she wrote stories and novels, most of them about West Africa, and all of them, in the early days of her career as a writer, fairly poor stuff. After years of effort and thorough checking of details with military men and traders returned from Africa to London, she produced salable fiction. A few years later she wrote her popular novel about West Africa, "The Uncounted Cost" (1904), visited the country of her dreams, and wrote an auto- biographical report of her trip up the River Volta. Like Mary Kingsley, another white lady who came to Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, she star- tled the provincial English administrators and the tribal chiefs when she entered African' bush villages as a respectful visitor eager to learn their customs.

Although Mary Gaunt wrote "The Uncounted Cost" before visiting Africa, her fiction is no less revealing of the West African milieu than her factual material. The novel clearly reveals her Conradian attitude to the African. She is full of sympathy for his pligh-t;

she is aghast at his black magic and savage methods of punishment (she describes in some detail the execu- tion of a native by tying him to an ant-heap). She senses the attraction of the vastness and anonymity of Africa, and she feels the great pull of "primitive" beliefs and theories. Ultimately, like Conrad, she is a rejector of Africa. It is a place to go through, a chal- lenge, but it is not a place to stay. And if she has sympathy for the African's enslavement, she cannot conceive of his equality with the Englishman in social and political spheres. She believes in the African's potential as a cultured human being but she sees no place for him in which to exploit his humanity. Af- rica, where his old traditions once worked, has been wrested from him, and he is not equipped to go else- where.

The plot of "The Uncounted Cost" reads like one of Kipling's adventure stories, and in its sympathy-with- out-commitment for the wrongs of the African it has a Kiplingesque atmosphere. The heroine, Anne Lovant, is a novelist who has written many tales about Africa though she has never visited the continent. For the past two years she has been living in a trial marriage (Anne is an advanced thinker) with Dicky Bullen, a British naval officer. The trial has ended with Dick's decision that Anne and marriage are not right for him. As the novel opens, Anne's close friend Kitty Pearce is having a guilty flirtation with Naval Com- mander Joe Cunningham. Kitty's husband, a doctor, is stationed in West Africa and regularly sends home his allowance to his "faithful" wife. Anne tells Kitty that this kind of flirtation is immoral: in her affair with Dicky Bullen, Anne was at least committed.

Since this is an early post-Victorian novel, sex is not mentioned, but its pall hangs over the book. For his weekend of fun with Kitty, Joe Cunningham misses his ship, which sails away without him, and the following day he is tricked into threateninng his superior officer; The result is court-martial and dis- missal from the service. Bitterly, Cunningham pre- pares for a new career, a career which takes him as an administrative officer to West Africa to the very station where Kitty's husband is practicing medicine. Because he likes Fred Pearce, Cunningham tells him the story of his downfall but keeps Kitty's identity a secret. And finally-and inevitably in such an earnest novel where moral questions must be neatly answered -Kitty arrives to visit her husband; she brings her friend Anne Lovant with her. The five are now to- gether in Africa, where the niceties of convention are to be stripped away, and truth is to be faced under the blazing sun.

What makes Miss Gaunt's novel more than a tonic to sip while hammocking is the sub-plot, the African note in the novel. The task that Joe Cunningham, as an officer of the British Crown, must meet is the extermination of fetish worship in his district. To insure the spread of Christian and Western suprem-

10 AFRICA TODAY

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acy, under the guise of bringing civilization to the blacks, all fetish cults have been outlawed. Since West African religion, in almost all cases, encompasses fet- ishism (Dr. Geoffrey Parrinder in Religion in West Africa (New York, 1961) schematizes African re- ligion into four basic components, one of which is the juju or fetish), this decision is tantamount to de- nouncing centuries of African culture. Miss Gaunt does not investigate the ramification of this conflict, but in the figure of Kudo Mensa she presents a sym- pathetic portrait of a wronged man. Kudo Mensa is an educated African prince, a black man who has gone to Oxford and learned his divinity at Baliol Col- lege. Ordained a priest of the Church of England, the Reverend Mr. John Trotter has returned to West Africa to help his country. But after several months he is no longer an Anglican priest or Mr. Trotter; he is now a priest of the ancient fetish cult Rewah and known to his followers as Kudo Mensa. Kudo tells Anne that he is a "man before his time" who must revert to primitivism. Educated beyond the needs of Africa-and not accepted by the British-he can find a place for himself only by going backward. Kudo is fighting a lost cause; he is trying to lead his people back into the mysteries of an ancient cult. Kudo is not a new character in English literature; he is a reverse Kurtz, a man who has surrendered to white culture in the heart of England and come back to Africa to find no place reserved for him. He fights a losing battle because a battle, a cause, even if doomed, fulfills a desperate longing in a man.

In her descriptions of Kudo, Miss Gaunt shows con- cern for his rootlessness, and sympathy for thp con- flicts which have damned him to the wrong path. When

Kudo is captured by Dicky Bullen, her lover, Anne feels compassion for the helpless, underfed, weak African in the grasp of the muscular, physically su- perior, and cruel white man. She pleads with Dicky not to flog Kudo, but Dicky eagerly snaps the whip. It is this constant humiliation by the white man that turns Kudo into a monster by the end of the novel. Bent only on killing, Kudo attempts to wipe out the compound where Anne, Kitty, Joe Cunningham, and Fred Pearce have taken refuge. Fortunately British troops arrive at the propitiously glorious moment. As Miss Gaunt puts it, these four British citizens had "held Dalaga against heavy odds. The British flag still flew! One more step had been taken in the clearing of the dark places of the earth!"

Mary Gaunt, like Joseph Conrad, represents the end of one tradition and the beginning of another. Just as Conrad brought a psychological awareness to the fas- cination of Africa for the white man, Mary Gaunt brought an understanding of the intelligent African whose education under contemporary conditions had to destroy all his roots without giving him new ones. Both writers were humanitarian in their attitudes to the sufferings of oppressed natives; but this attitude, while always a part of them, was not what truly moti- vated them. Conrad was fascinated by the "abomina- tion" of Africa. Mary Gaunt was held by its promise of nobility. In the Reverend John Trotter-Kudo Mensa, she showed that nobility-gone-wrong. The Noble Sav- age has become the modern rootless intellectual who can act, but only in the most violent, senseless man- ner. He is the forerunner of a host of African heroes who are compelled to commit violence against the white men they both love and hate.

report on south afrik

ifiE AX FAIS ON THE WHITES Mary-Louise Hooper

T HERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN individual whites who have worked with non- whites in South Africa, and since the formation of the Liberal Party

and the Congress of Democrats in 1955 there have also been organizations- predominantly "white"-that in various ways have aided and supported Africans and other citizens of "color" in their fight for justice and equality. The Liberal Party, the Congress of Democrats, the Black Sash, some of the churches, the Institute of Race Relations, and,. to a lesser extent, the Pro- gressive Party-these are the major collaborating or cooperating groups.

Since the Sharpeville massacre of March 1960 government pressure on the white liberals has steadily in- creased. Many were jailed during the 1960 Emergency, some for as long as five months; hundreds have been banned, prevented from carrying on

the work of their organizations, and frequently cut off from their very livelihoods, especially if they hap- pened to be trade union officials. Since the enactment in 1963 of the General Law Amendment Act, sec- tion 17 of which is known as the

notorious "90-day" clause, large num- bers of whites of a liberal persuasion have been "detained"-in jail-along with hundreds of non-whites.

Quite recently, however, the Gov- ernment seems to have decided on a new "hard line" against all white co- operation with the non-white cause. As the Johannesburg Star editorial- ized on August 29 last:

"Non-Europeans have long lived under a system of arbitrary laws. The axe has now fallen on a wide section of the white population . . . who have been made to realize that their own freedom is limited to those

OCTOBER 1964 11

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