The African Novel: The Four TraditionsAuthor(s): Martin TuckerSource: Africa Today, Vol. 11, No. 6 (Jun., 1964), pp. 7-9Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4184532 .

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criticism

TeAfrican Novel I One THE FOUR TRADITIONS

Martin Tucker

GRAHAM GREENE ONCE DESCRIBED AFRICA as being in the shape of a human heart. To others it has

been a jungle or a plaything. The images Africa has conjured up have been many, and usually partake of the unreal, the remote, and the romantic. Only in the 20th century have writers in English both African and non-African-attempted to deal with the African spirit or the African personality as the indivisible root in literature about Africa.

Certainly, throughout the 19th century, the African was a stock figure in literature. Unfortunately the bulk of Victorian novels in which he appeared were written by second- and third-rate authors, who were interested in excoriating the evils of the slave trade at the same time they were exploiting its sensational details for an eager public. Many of these novelists, fearing that the natives would be either killed or en- slaved at the hands of European conquerors, urged a more enlightened policy of colonialism. Ironically the only Victorian novelist of stature who wrote on Africa was a romanticist. H. Rider Haggard was to tip the balance of literary influence back to an exotic primi- tivism. As early as 1896 he was bemoaning in a letter the civilized invasion of Africa: "That country of which Allan tells his tales is now, for the most part, as well known and explored as the fields of Norfolk. All is changed."

Haggard's enormous popularity was achieved with the publication of his fifth novel, "King Solomon's Mines," on September 30, 1885. With the exception of his novels about Iceland and Egypt, most of Haggard's fiction is drawn from the mysterious heart of Black Africa and uses a familiar structural device, the quest. A white hunter seeks a lost, fascinating king- dom and civilization. In "King Solomon's Mines" Allan Quatermain, Sir Henry Curtis, and Captain John Good go in quest of the fabled Ophir, the storehouse of Solomon's treasures. In "She" these three explorers discover a kingdom in which the queen never grows old. In "The Ancient Allan" the same intrepid ex- plorers set out on an expedition into the interior of Africa to discover what no other man has found. In their travels they come upon the strange land ruled by Sorais, Lady of the Night, and her elder sister Nyleptha.

Haggard's tales are filled with a primitive Africa,

a country remote from the mundane progress of white, Western civilization. Although his understanding of the mind of the primitive African is limited, Haggard is sympathetic and respectful toward African, and partcularly Zulu, civilization. Umslopagaas, in "The Ancient Allan," is an idealized portrait of a primitive warrior who is graceful even when he swings his axe to kill his enemies.

Haggard's fascination with Africa stems from his belief that the African, in his intuitive state, possesses some secret that the rational white man has lost. Yet it is a curious fact that Haggard's heroes, after they have found the lost Garden of Eden in Africa, after they have tasted the joys of unspoiled nature, find some reason to return to their Westernized world. Like Melville's hero in "Typee," they find or invent an excuse to retrieve the less pleasurable world from which they have wandered. Haggard keeps sending his heroes back to undiscovered, joyful kingdoms, but always they leave the natural state of grace after only a brief immersion in it. Of course, the exigencies of plot could well be the reason that Haggard had to rescue his heroes from joy in order to give them an- other trek into the next volume of his Quatermain series, but the reason may also lie in Haggard's am- biguous attitude to pleasure. In all his novels the quest for beauty is what idealizes the character; the indulgence in beauty is brief and ridden with guilt.

Haggard brought world-wide attention to the exotic African novel. His influence was vast, and a whole stream of fiction followed in the wake of "King Solo- mon's Mines." That influence can still be seen today on the movie and television screens in the persons of Tarzan and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Haggard's followers have corrupted and sentimentalized his image of Africa in their willingness to satisfy the public demand for romantic illusion, but in Haggard's own hands the Noble Savage was representative of a civilization as well as of a far-off land.

Africa throughout the 19th century was exploited

MARTIN TUCKER is in the English Department of Long Island University. He has contributed to the American Scholar, The New Republic, The Saturday Review among other publications. This is the first of a series of articles on the African novel.

JUNE 1964 7

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as aIh exotic jungle and as an expedition for the social humanitarian. These two angles of perspective were to continue to be focused on into the 20th century, but a new picture, seen through new eyes-the politi- cal evolution of Africa-was to be painted. In addi- tion, Africa in the early 20th century was to become a psychological journey, a descent into the Central Station of one's existence.

Indeed, one may say that four traditions are re- flected in the modern novel in English about Africa. These traditions are dominantly romantic, psycholog- ical, satiric, and sociological. In addition to H. Rider Haggard, the writers who have played the greatest part in extending these influences are Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh, Joyce Cary, William Plomer, and Alan Paton. A special case may be allowed for Olive Schreiner, whose work has influenced all later South African literature, but whose own novels are a-develop- ment of the post-Victorian bleak humanism as repre- sented in Thomas Hardy and Herbert Spencer. These traditions are not so much exclusive as preeminent, and although they are not isolated within one period, the dominance of one or another is found in certain decades. The romantic, idealized portrait of the Noble Savage that Haggard and his literary descendants presented enjoyed its greatest vogue at the end of the 19th century, but the vogue is still in evidence today.

The Conradian tradition-that is, seeing Africa as a journey to experience and painful maturity-was most popular in the 1930's and 1940's when, in popular banter, it was often said that one went either to a psychoanalyst or to Africa. Today Conrad's influence may be seen in Robert Shaw's "The Sun Doctor," Graham Greene's "A Burnt-Out Case," and Thomas Hinde's two recent novels about Africa and its white heroes struggling for a personal awareness, "A Place Like Home" and "The Cage."

Although satire of the struggles of Africa seems. to be regarded as in poor taste today by many critics, the tradition of spoofing introduced by Evelyn Waugh and Joyce Cary in the 1930's continues with such books as "'Jimmy Riddle" by Ian Brook, "Devil of a State" by Anthony Burgess, and "George Washington September, Sir!" by Ronald Harwood.

'The most dominant influence today, however, is sociology, and in their attempts to portray the new African milieu with its problems of independence, nationalism, and displacement of the white settler class, both African and non-African novelists are succumbing to the smiothering embraces of fervent propaganda.

After "Heart of Darkness" was published by Joseph Conrad in 1902, English fiction about Africa changed its direction. Both English and Continental fiction had utilized Afriea as a school for moral in- struction; the Germans particularly used Africa as a proving-ground of their superior moral qualities. It was Conrad who introduced Africa as a psychological state, and after his exploration the heart of English

fiction about Africa lay in its compulsive psychic lure. Conrad's influence is weakest in South Africa, but even there Dan Jacobson has said that "'Heart of Darkness' is the most important book on Africa ever written."

Conrad's influence extends outside the English lan- guage: Andre Gide took his "Travels in the Congo" in order to find the same psychological understanding that Conrad had achieved in Central Africa. Gide dedicated his book -to Conrad, and like Conrad he wanted to get beneath the beating of the African heart into its innermost sound. Gide used similar im- agery: "What we want is precisely to leave the beaten track, to see what one does not see -ordinarily, to enter profoundly, intimately, into the heart of the country." Again like Conrad, Gide did not regard Africa as a mere biographical incident. It was not the fact that Conrad was making use of his personal experience at Matadi and Kinchassa in 1890 that gave him the impetus to write "Heart of Darkness." When he was nine years old, Conrad says in his "Journal up the Congo," he had decided to visit the "strange" land of Africa; he had stuck a pin into the heart of "the Dark Continent" on his wall map. Gide says in his book, "I was barely 20 when I first made up my mind to make this journey to the Congo-36 years ago." It is this obsessive belief, this psychic need, that characterized the writings of Conrad, Gide, Graham Greene, the German writer Kurt Heuser, Frederick Prokosch, Laurens van der Post, Thomas Hinde, and a host of other novelists. Africa becomes for these writers not a geographic center but a psychoanalytic tool.

To a certain extent Conrad's psycho-symbolic use of Africa is an extension of Haggard's quest theme. Haggard's characters traveled to distant centers, into the interior of the past, and they also discovered secrets that enabled them to return to Western shores wiser men than they were when they left, but they were not driven by psychological compulsion. Their interest in the quest was intellectual, romantic, and sophisticated; they were not looking, consciously or *subconsciously, for a possible faith to fill the empti- ness within themselves..

Conrad's influence is most apparent in Graham Greene, who reveals his debt through references in "Journey Without Maps" (1936) and in "In Search of a Character: Two African Journals" (1961). It is also apparent in other writers in two such diverse novels as "The African Queen" by C. S. Forester and "Mamba" by Stuart Cloete, in the use of the motif of the journey down the real river to the destination of personal development. In "Journey Inward" by Kurt Heuser, translated from the German by Wilia and Edwin Muir (1932), the Conradian theme of self- development through confrontation with darkness is carried into the plot of a land surveyor who travels into the unexplored regions beyond any geographical journey. Among the many other novels patterned in

8 AFRICA TODAY

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this mold of a man journeying to Africa to find his inner self are "Behind the Mirror" by R. C. Maugham (1955), Gerald Hanley's "Drinkers of Darkness" (1955), David Mathew's "Mango on the Mango Tree" (1951), "Storm and Echo" by Frederick Prokosch (1948), "Red Rock Wilderness' by Elspeth Huxley (1957), and Robert Shaw's "The Sun Doctor" (1961).

The Conradian theme, stated briefly, is the neces- sity of traveling to the dark places of the earth in order to bring light to one's self. It is not always a journey that ends in success. In "Heart of Darkness" the man who plunges deepest is the one who drowns, while Marlow, the narrator who observes but does not participate in evil, travels back to the safety of Eu- rope. In Conrad's only other piece of fiction about Africa, a short story entitled "Outposts of Progress," the harmful effects of Africa-its heat, its drudgery, its sloth-lead to the suicide and murder of the two white heroes at an isolated African station. Conrad does not idealize Africa as the romantic and adventure novelists do; he presents Africa and the consciousness of Africa as a psychological compulsion that ends always in pain and sometimes in death.

This obsession of the white man with Black Africa as a psychological, spiritual, or moral road to salvation is found in other areas of literature than fiction. Its expression has been so pervasive that a reaction has set in among African and American Negro writers, who see in it another expression of the white man's condescension to Negro and African customs and beliefs. In "Black Power," a record of his tour through Ghana in 1954, the late Richard Wright attacked this white man's psychic need of Africa, calling it "the greatest millstone about the neck of Africa for the past three hundred years."

Possibly in reaction to the proliferation of novels using Africa as a psychological determinant, a new kind of novel in English about Africa has appeared, found frequently in England and the United States, and also in West Africa. In it Africa and Africans are viewed as entrants into the new role of independ- ent personal and political forces. Unfortunately many of these novels are tracts not far enough removed from their social protest to achieve a distinction in characterization. The most popular kind of novel in English about Africa today is more distinguished for its sociological commentary than for its artistic real- ization.

The reasons for this failure are not difficult to sug- gest. Art does not move at the same pace as politics, and political independence is no sure sign of artistic maturation. Often enough literature has displayed itself at.the decline, rather than the beginning, of a civilization. The trouble with most contemporay Eng- lish literature about Africa is the commingling of the two elements, art and socio-politics, with the strength of an inner vision but without the discipline of an artistic form. Topicality is ruining the novel about Africa at the same time it is making it relevant to sociologists, politicians, and journalists.

The novel about Africa has reached the state where it is in need of rescue from this topicality. English and American observers have become journalists of the scene, while a few of them continue to exploit the traditions of Conrad and Haggard without reinvigor- ating them. The field is wide open for the African novelists, but the dangers that face them are just as serious; they must not rob their novels of univer- sal relevance by tying them too tightly to an imme- diate cause, no matter how burning that cause may be.

Shape

of Good Hope

Anne Morrissette Davidon

"It is said the Negroes cannot make anything square in shape. They have trained their eyes to see and make only round things. We never find nature drawing straight lines or rectilinear figures.

M. K. Gandhi, "Satyagraha in South Africa"

The four-square Boer, Unable to round the dark land, Put pointed anchor down Set flat foot on rolling grassland, Squared it off with quarries, mines, Locations, blocks, box houses; Converted multi-angular diamonds for distant vaults,

Shaped soft gold into hard rectangular bricks To be sold, shipped, packed again into the earth; Drew sharp lines between subtle shades, Carved from the hills a stark Dutch chessboard, Sternly played the game with ebon pawns; Laid the four-square gospel on the two-edged sword, Straight-shooting metal, letter of the law; And put into the treason cage those who roundly

objected. JUNE 1964 9

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