All posts tagged masks

Pen, Pencil, And Poison: A study in Green by Oscar Wilde (1891)

Pen, Pencil and Poison is an essay by Oscar Wilde, a witty and provocative summary of the life and career of the notorious Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, who was a painter, essayist, aesthete, literary critic and famous serial killer from the first part of the nineteenth century.

A first version of the essay was published by Frank Harris in the January 1889 edition of The Fortnightly Review. Wilde then revised it for inclusion in the volume of four essays titled Intentions which he intended to use to position himself as a major critic of late Victorian art, literature and theatre, and which was published in May 1891.

(The same year saw the publication of his collection of short stories, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and the expanded, book-length version of The Picture of Dorian Gray. The following year the first of his social comedies was produced. Critic. Short story writer. Novelist. Playwright. Within two years Wilde very impressively proved himself the master of all these genres and manoeuvred himself into the centre of London’s literary and intellectual life.)

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright

The story of Thomas Griffiths Wainewright (1794 to 1847) was well known by Wilde’s time and had been written about by a number of authors. The Essays and Criticisms of Wainewright had been published in 1880 and the history of his crimes was used by Charles Dickens as the basis for his story ‘Hunted Down’ and by Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his novel Lucretia. Indeed Wilde’s essay features quotes and memoirs of people who knew or met or read Wainewright, such as Hazlitt, de Quincey, Charles Lamb, with anecdotes about William Blake et al. Even the title isn’t original having been borrowed from Swinburne.

What obviously attracted Wilde was the close connection between art and crime. Wainewright’s letters, writings and memoirs reveal a man of high artistic sensibility and great psychological sensitivity. Yet the same man set about poisoning to death a number of those nearest and dearest to him.

His delicately strung organisation, however indifferent it might have been to inflicting pain on others, was itself most keenly sensitive to pain.

Biography

According to Wilde, Wainewright was born in 1794 in Chiswick. His mother died in childbirth. She was just 21 and followed soon after by the death of his father, so the baby was raised by its grandfather and then uncle.

Right from the start the essay displays the deliberately, comically casual juxtaposition of conventional biography with Wainwright’s activities as a poisoner i.e. the bland phrases of standard biography are interspersed with very casual mention of his murders.

His father did not long survive his young wife, and the little child seems to have been brought up by his grandfather, and, on the death of the latter in 1803, by his uncle George Edward Griffiths, whom he subsequently poisoned.

A similar flippancy underlies Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and The Canterville Ghost, whose achievements in scaring various Canterville relatives to death or terrifying visitors out of their minds are listed as subjects of great amusement. It is the bluntness of the juxtaposition which achieves the effect.

Wainewright joined the army, buying a commission in 1814, but was too sensitive for the rough vulgarity of barrack life, had a nervous breakdown, was cashiered out, went back to stay with his uncle in a fine house in Turnham Green, and became ever more interested in literature. His maternal grandfather was editor of the Monthly Review and Wainewright had been raised in a bookish intellectual milieu. In 1819 he embarked on a literary career. He wrote essays. He had them published, most often in the London Magazine. Literary figures of the day began to take notice.

Wilde is particularly pleased that Wainewright wrote essays for literary journals under a number of pseudonyms. This plays right into Wilde’s fondness for masks and artificiality.

Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These disguises intensified his personality.

Dandy

And Wainewright was a dandy:

Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of being different from others.

Wilde obviously sees him as a precursor to himself:

It is only the Philistine who seeks to estimate a personality by the vulgar test of production. This young dandy sought to be somebody, rather than to do something. He recognised that Life itself is in art, and has its modes of style no less than the arts that seek to express it.

Wilde likes Wainewright because in his writings he cultivated a cult of his own personality, liberally telling his readers not only his views on art, but where he dined and who he met and what they talked about and what he was wearing, very much a precursor to Oscar himself.

Wainewright’s collection

Wilde goes on at length about Wainewright’s collections of beautiful objects from a wide variety of sources, and his writings not only about art in the narrow sense, but about all beautiful things from the past, statues and jewels, rare books and cameos and engravings, he delighted in letting his soul wander among masterpieces in a way Wilde thoroughly approves. The truly beautiful fly free from a particular age and congregate in a timeless imaginarium.

All beautiful things belong to the same age.

Wainewright the artist

Wainewright also painted and sketched to a very high standard. He was trained by John Linnell and Thomas Phillips, he produced a portrait of Lord Byron, made illustrations for the poems of William Chamberlayne, and from 1821 to 1825 exhibited narratives based on literature and music at the Royal Academy. So he had a practitioner’s inside knowledge of the craft when he came to write about art, and Wilde quotes passages which talk in technical terms about colours, design and glazes.

The critic seeks the thing in itself

He approves Wainewright’s aesthetic writings and above all the idea that the critic shouldn’t apply standardised rules to a work, but instead be flexible and respond to the thing as it is.

‘I hold that no work of art can be tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not it be consistent with itself is the question.’

Wainewright’s prose poem responses to art

That said, Wilde admires the way Wainewright responds to art with long prose poems which seek to mimic or replicate their effect in words.

The conception of making a prose poem out of paint is excellent. Much of the best modern literature springs from the same aim. In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Wilde’s approval of Wainewright’s technique of ‘criticising’ a work of art by writing a long florid prose poem based on it explains why so much Victorian writing about art is unpleasantly vague and gaseous. In my opinion it also explains why English taste in art remained so conservative and retarded until well into the twentieth century.

Van Gogh and Gauguin while Wilde was still alive, and then the Fauves, the German Expressionists and the Cubists within a few years of his death, completely tore up the nineteenth century rulebook of art to create all kinds of marvellous new images and sensations which Wilde’s style of limp-wristed prose vaporings were completely inadequate to understanding or explaining.

Wilde sits at the end of a fagged-out tradition. His aestheticism was new in the 1870s but tired by the 1890s. His love of the classical world was merely the exquisite climax of a tradition which had dominated the British education system for a century. Wilde comes at the end of both these traditions, before the turn of the twentieth century ushered in entirely new ways of seeing and thinking. For all his brave talk about The New, praising new sensations in art and life, Wilde revered the past and hadn’t a clue about the revolutionary turn all the arts were about to take. His approach, his whole aesthetic, was a glorious dead end and that’s why he was a back number even before he died.

Wainewright the poisoner

Half-way through the essay which had, up to this point, been a charming stroll through Wainewright’s art criticism, aesthetic stance, prose poetry and delightful collection of rare and precious objects – Wilde turns with a flourish and an ironic smile to the fact that this gorgeous proto-aesthete was also a murderer. In doing so he uses a very characteristic phrase which is worth dwelling on:

However, we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines, and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences, was also, as I said at the beginning of this memoir, one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age. How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell us, and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted, has unfortunately been lost to us.

The words ‘strange’ and ‘sin’ are very characteristically Wildean. He uses ‘strange’ a lot throughout the essays in Intentions as a buzzword, a key word, a key adjective which indicates the mood of weird, fin-de-siecle mystery Wilde likes to shed around his own personality, the great works of art he reverences and so on. When Wainewright returns to England in 1837, it is very characteristic of Wilde to say he did so because of ‘some strange mad fascination’.

However, on closer examination, there’s often nothing at all ‘strange’ in what he’s describing. Thus there is nothing ‘strange’ about being a murderer.

Something similar with ‘sin’, Wilde enjoys saying that this or that personality or work of art hints at ‘sin’. If you stop and think about it he is stealing a Catholic Christian term and dressing it in the vague, heavy velvet of the Decadence and then attributing it – like his other favourite words ‘strange’, ‘curious’, ‘dangerous’ – to people or actions which, on closer examination, do not merit it. He uses it in a spirit of high symbolist melodrama to conjure an overripe atmosphere but empty of precise meaning.

It is tempting to go along with Wilde’s prose and be carried away into the purple and gold world of luxury objects illuminated by flickering candlelight which phrases like ‘strange sin’ suggest. Except Wainewright was a murderer, pure and simple. Nobody would write about the ‘strange sin’ of Harold Shipman or Fred West. There was nothing either strange or sin-nish about either multiple murderer.

Wainewright’s victims

(This section borrows freely from the Wikipedia article as Wilde’s account is factually incorrect. To give the most obvious example Wilde has Wainewright dying in 1852, whereas it was 1847.)

The key fact to grasp is that, although Wainewright had inherited £5,250 from his grandfather, it was invested at the Bank of England, he was unable to touch the capital and receiving only the dividends of £200 a year. This combined with the income from his journalism was nowhere near enough to maintain the extravagant lifestyle, with the collection of fancy art works Wilde delights in describing, not to mention a wife he’d married in 1817 (when he was 23).

On two occasions he forged the signatures of powers of attorney in order to withdraw the capital from the Bank, the second time leaving his account empty. Now he was in desperate financial straits and it is this which explains the series of murders he now embarked on.

By 1828 the Wainewrights were in severe financial trouble again and forced to move in with the elderly George Griffiths, still living at the Wainewright estate in Chiswick. He died in agony shortly afterwards. and it is suspected Wainewright poisoned him to inherit the property.

Eliza’s mother married again, becoming a Mrs Abercromby, and had two further daughters, Helen and Madalina, before being widowed again. They too moved into the estate, and Mrs Abercromby settled her will in favour of Eliza. She died shortly afterwards. It is strongly suspected he murdered her.

In 1830, he and Eliza insured the life of his sister-in-law Helen with various companies for a sum of £16,000. She died in December of the same year after showing signs of strychnine poisoning. The insurance companies refused to pay and Wainewright fled to Calais in order to escape legal action and his increasingly clamorous debtors. Victorian authors speculate that he also killed his mother-in-law and a Norfolk friend.

In 1837 Wainewright returned to England, was arrested for bank fraud, convicted and deported to Hobart, Van Diemen’s Land, where he spent the last ten years of his life, dying in 1847.

Wilde’s account contains detailed descriptions of further murders, such as the father of a lady friend with whom he was staying in Boulogne and who he is said to have murdered purely to spite the insurance companies.

Wilde’s calculated heartlessness

The tone Wilde describes all this in is deliberately flippant and superficial. He doesn’t take the murders seriously and instead is tempted into characteristic raptures about art and beauty. Thus Helen, his wife’s sister:

was about twenty years of age, a tall graceful girl with fair hair. A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence, and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration. De Quincey says that Mrs. Wainewright was not really privy to the murder. Let us hope that she was not. Sin should be solitary, and have no accomplices.

A lot is going on in this passage but the obvious points to me are the way Wilde goes out of his way to be more interested in the painting of Helen done by the murderer than the fact that he murdered her. Making fine art critical comments about the painting are more important than the fact of murder. Wilde’s position is not immoral, as such, but it is a very calculated promotion of Wilde’s ideas that art comes first, art is paramount, that art triumphs over the sordor and messiness of life, that art soars above facts, that art isn’t limited by bourgeois morality and petty notions of right or wrong.

The second obvious point is his use of ‘sin’. As stated above, Wainewright’s acts weren’t really ‘sins’, were they? They were crimes. Accepting the word ‘sin’ is to enter Wilde’s fin-de-siecle world of decadence and ‘strange’ practices. He intends the word ‘sin’ to shimmer with scarlet associations and strange cries in velvet-lined rooms, and yet it comes over as naughty schoolboy. Poisoning someone for the insurance money isn’t a ‘sin’. It’s a crime.

Wilde thought of his encounters with quite a few rent boys as ‘strange’ ‘sins’ and yet they weren’t. He was paying for sex. He was using sex workers. Some of them were under age so nowadays he would be convicted of paedophilia and put on a Sex Offenders Register.

Wilde set himself up to try and redefine how people talked about these things. It was a battle of discourses or lexicons. He tried to persuade his time of the value of ‘strange sin’. The law courts of his time saw a man who practiced and promoted sex crimes.

The provocative heartlessness of Wilde’s stance is crystallised when he quotes Wainewright. When he was in Newgate prison awaiting transportation, his cell became ‘for some time a kind of fashionable lounge’ (doesn’t sound very likely, does it?), one gentleman visitor asked him why he murdered his innocent young sister-in-law:

He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Yes; it was a dreadful thing to do, but she had very thick ankles.’

It is very funny in its deliberately heartless way. Wilde moves briskly on, to get back to ‘sin’. He tells us that Wainewright loathed the sea journey to Australia, and tells us why.

Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation. There was probably no one on board in whom he would have found a sympathetic listener, or even a psychologically interesting nature.

This suggests that Wilde is interested not in the sordid ‘crime’ committed by the wretched poor all the time. What interests him about Wainewright is the combination of fantastically refined sensibility with murder. It is Wainewright’s refined sensibility which converts what would be mere ‘crime’ in you and me into ‘sin’. ‘Sin’ is what the refined do; the rest of us merely break the law.

Crime and art

Wilde concludes his essay by speculating about the effect of his crimes on his art. Wainewright was allowed to sketch and paint in the prison colony, completing more than 100 portraits on paper using coloured wash, pencil and ink, and many survive to this day. Wilde says the effect of his crimes (er, ‘sins’) on his art is ‘subtle and suggestive’.

One can fancy an intense personality being created out of sin.

This is obviously the central theme of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the notion that ‘sin’ adds depth and interest to one’s style. Obviously one has to have a refined sensibility and be an artist and critic and writer in order to have a style in the first place and to benefit from these ‘sins’.

He ends with a barrage of opinions against conventional morality, variations on the theme of the superiority of the artist to social norms and standards:

The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose. The domestic virtues are not the true basis of art, though they may serve as an excellent advertisement for second-rate artists.

There is no essential incongruity between crime and culture. We cannot rewrite the whole of history for the purpose of gratifying our moral sense of what should be.

This latter is an implicit rebuke to the trend of modern progressive ideology in the humanities which is to pull down statues, ban books and films and plays and art by anyone judged to have transgressed the strict morality of our times. Wilde believes the contrary:

I know that there are many historians, or at least writers on historical subjects, who still think it necessary to apply moral judgments to history, and who distribute their praise or blame with the solemn complacency of a successful schoolmaster. This, however, is a foolish habit, and merely shows that the moral instinct can be brought to such a pitch of perfection that it will make its appearance wherever it is not required. Nobody with the true historical sense ever dreams of blaming Nero, or scolding Tiberius, or censuring Caesar Borgia. These personages have become like the puppets of a play. They may fill us with terror, or horror, or wonder, but they do not harm us. They are not in immediate relation to us. We have nothing to fear from them. They have passed into the sphere of art and science, and neither art nor science knows anything of moral approval or disapproval.

Not in our modern world, in 2024, where moral disapproval is the central occupation of so many critics and commentators, poring over the art and writing of the past in an endless quest for transgressions to call out and cancel, to scold, chastise, disapprove of and, ideally, ban. Wilde would have been horrified.

Related reviews

Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe (1964)

Arrow of God was Chinua Achebe’s third novel. It forms, along with 1) Things Fall Apart and 2) No Longer at Ease, the so-called ‘African Trilogy’. It shares similar settings and themes as its predecessors, being set among rural tribal people in the south-east of colonial-era Nigeria.

Book 1 of the trilogy, Things Fall Apart, is set in the 1890s and concerns Okonkwo, a big man in the local village, Umuofia. Book 2, No Longer At Ease, is about Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi Okonkwo, now living in Lagos but who frequently revisits his parents in his ancestral home, Umuofia, and is set 60 years later, in the 1950s.

Arrow of God is set chronologically between the two previous books, in the 1920s. It tells the story of Ezeulu, the chief priest of a set of six villages in Igboland, so not the Umuofia of books 1 and 2, though very similar in developmental level (very basic), diet, culture and religion. And Umuofia is mentioned several times as being a nearby village, so it’s still very much in the same region.

The phrase ‘Arrow of God’ comes from an Igbo proverb in which a person, or sometimes an event, is said to represent the will of God, an idea which is only fully explained right at the end of the narrative.

Arrow of God is twice as long as either of its predecessors, the chapters are longer, and Ezeulu has a larger extended family than Okwonkwo in the first novel. Just some of the reasons I found Arrow of God the hardest to read of the three books but, in the end, possibly the most rewarding.

Chapter 1

Ezeulu is the chief priest of Ulu, which seems to comprise the six villages of Umuaro (later listed as Umuachala, Umunneora, Umuagu, Umuezeani and Umuogwugwu). He is old. His eyesight is failing. He has an extended family:

Ezeulu’s first wife, Okuata who died years ago, mother of:
- Ezeulu’s eldest son Edogo, ‘quiet and brooding’, carving a tribal Mask, married to Amoge, has a small child
- eldest daughter, Adeze, tall and bronze skinned (p.361)
- daughter, Akueke, marries a man who beats her, so comes home for a year
  - Akueke’s daughter, Nkechi
Ezeulu’s second and senior wife, ‘head wife’, Matefi (feels ignored by Ezeulu who favours his youngest wife, Ugoye):
- Matefi’s son, and Ezeulu’s eldest son, Obika, tendency to anger, boastfulness and drunkenness
- Matefi’s daughter Ojiugo
Ezeulu’s third and youngest wife, Ugoye:
- Oduche, the son sent to Church to learn the ways of the white man
- Obiageli, a girl child
- youngest son, still a boy, Nwafo
Ezeulu’s younger brother, Okeye Onenyi

To recap, Ezeulu’s sons are, in order of age:

Edogo
Obika
Oduche
Nwafo

The narrative opens with Ezeulu fulfilling one of the duties of his role which is to scan the skies for the arrival of a new moon. When he sees it, Ezeulu ritualistically roasts one of the 12 holy yams set aside to mark the 12 months of the year. When the twelfth and final yam is eaten, it triggers the Feast of the New Yam. Only then are the villagers allowed to set about harvesting the next crop of yams. This custom, which has the weight of religious belief behind it, will be the cause of the crisis which brings to book to its climax…

For the time being, it’s during this process of Ezeulu waiting for, then sighting, the new moon, that we meet most of the members of his extended family, arguing and bickering or going about their daily activities.

There are flashbacks to notable events. Most striking is the time his daughter, Akueke, came back to Ezeulu’s obi or compound, after being badly beaten, yet again, by her abusive husband, Ibe. This threw Ezeulu’s son, Obika, into a fury and he stormed off to the other village where the husband lived, beat him badly and returned carrying him tied to his bed. Ibe was left on this bed, under a tree for several days, before his kin arrived to reclaim him and complain about his treatment. They accepted that his beating Akueke was wrong but complained at him being abducted.

The point of this kind of anecdote is it shows how the tribal people had their own set of values and their own ways of sorting out disagreements or addressing unacceptable behaviour, according to custom and tradition.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 describes how the six villages of Umuachala, Umunneora, Umuagu, Umuezeani, Umuogwugwu and Umuisiuzo came together for protection against slave raids from a place called Abame. They named themselves Umuaro and commissioned medicine men to create a god for them, who was named Ulu. When they banded together like this, the town of Okperi gave them land to build on as well as the deities Udo and Ogwugwu to worship.

But now, several years later, the leaders of Umuaro want to go to war with Okperi. The issue is some farmland which has lain fallow for years, whose ownership Umuaro and Okperi are contesting.

The chapter focuses on a big meeting of the tribal elders at which Ezeulu explains all this and counsels peace. But he is defeated by a big speech by Nwaka, who tells a different narrative about the founding of Umuaro and implies that its menfolk have become lazy cowards.

The meeting agrees to send Akukalia, who is aggressively for war, as an envoy to Okperi, to sound them out. Ezeulu counsels caution but isn’t listened to. Akukalia and his two companions go to the compound of one of his relatives, Uduezue, where he is rude and graceless, ignoring rituals of friendship and demanding to see the Okperi elders. Uduezue takes him to see Otikpo, they are joined by Ebo, all of them insisting that serious business cannot be conducted on a market day like today.

The conversation degenerates into shouting during which Ebo implies Akukalia is impotent so the latter attacks Ebo, beating him round the head. Ebo runs off to get a machete but Akukalia beats him to it, rushing into his hut, grabbing his ikenga or personal fetish and splitting it in two. Everyone is horrified at this sacrilege, Ebo loads his musket and, as Akukalia charges him, shoots him dead.

So war breaks out. First there is another big meeting of the elders. Ezeulu again takes a critical role, saying it was a mistake to send a hot-head like Akukalia and advising calm. But the war party, led by Nwaka, say that it is insulting that Okperi haven’t sent envoys to apologise for Akukalia’s death. Nwaka organises a separate meeting to which Ezeulu isn’t invited and makes a speech saying the High Priest isn’t a king, and can’t advise about policy, his only job is to conduct religious rituals. This meeting opts for war and there follow two days of fighting.

Maybe the most significant single aspect of all this is the scale of the so-called war. For on the first day Umuaro kills just two men from Okperi. On the following day Umuaro kills four men and Okperi kills three. Nine dead. Peanuts compared to the post-independence African wars I’ve been reading about, minuscule numbers.

Anyway the whole thing grinds to a halt when the local white man, who they call Winterbotta, intervenes with armed troops. Winterbotta confiscates the guns from both sides and publicly destroys them.

The thing about this entire event which I found hard to decipher from the text is that it is a flashback. The Ezeulu of the present, the man watching for the new moon, is remembering events which happened five years ago. The thing is he is still bitter/upset at having been ignored, and still upset that a large part of the elders of the six villages continue to think he was wrong, and continue to support Nwaka.

Chapter 3

The chapters about the natives, locals or Africans, alternate with chapters about the handful of British administrators working in the Okperi region. These are:

Captain Winterbottom, District Commissioner, been in Nigeria 15 years
Mr Clarke, Assistant District Officer, only been on station for 4 weeks
Roberts, an Assistant Superintendent of Police in charge of the local detachment
Wade, in charge of the prison aka the Assistant Superintendent
Wright, doesn’t not really belong to the station, a Public Works Department man supervising the new road to Umuaro

Winterbottom considers himself an old hand. He fought against the Germans in the Cameroon campaign of 1916, where he gained the rank of captain. He has had to tell Wright off for sleeping with local women. He also suspects he’s using bad methods, including whipping, to get his road made.

It is bloody hot. Everyone is awaiting the arrival of the rains. He is awaiting the arrival of young Tony Clarke for dinner. Clarke’s only been out four weeks. For his part, Clarke is nervous and irritated at having to wear a formal dinner suit in the stifling heat.

As conversation, Winterbottom points out the collection of native guns he has and explains that he confiscated them from the natives to end a small conflict. This, of course, is the war we’ve seen described in chapter 2. there is a point here which is that Winterbottom’s explanation is significantly wrong, or glosses over the subtler details which Achebe’s account included. It’s the kind of simplifying which any administrator might apply to a situation, but the gap between the native understanding / explanation and the colonial one is significant and symbolic.

Anyway Winterbottom proudly tells Clarke it was this act that won him the local nickname of Otiji-Egbe, the Breaker of Guns. And a key feature of the whole little incident is that Winterbottom found that the only native who didn’t lie, who had integrity and told the truth, was a local high priest named Ezeulu.

Clarke is reading a book about Africa, ‘The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger’ by George Allen. This is notable because mention of this very book is made in the last sentence of Things Fall Apart. In that book the long complicated life story of the protagonist, Okonkwo, is reduced to a few sentences in the larger book being written by the administrator under whose rule Okonkwo is alienated and, eventually, kills himself. It is mightily symbolic that Clarke is reading the book. In its position at the end of Fall Apart it demonstrated how native traditions and entire life stories were almost completely ignored, misunderstood, reduced to a handful of sentences. Now the reference here shows how such misunderstandings and simplifications were handed down through the generations of colonialists, becoming accepted fact, becoming part of the discourse of power and administration.

We hear Winterbottom criticising London’s policy of indirect rule i.e. the policy of wherever possible creating local chiefs and leaders. Winterbottom thinks this is misconceived and is leading to all kinds of petty tyrants being artificially created.

Chapter 4

So five years pass after that ‘war’ and Nwaka gains increasing influence in Umuaro. He has an important backer, Ezidemili who is the priest of Idemili, the personal deity of one of the six villages, Umunneora. Ezidimili points out that Idemili has existed since the beginning of time whereas Ulu was created by the villagers.

When Winterbotta asked Ezeulu to nominate a member of his family to go to church to learn the ways of the white man he nominated his son Oduche, In fact it took 3 years for Ezeulu to enact this decision i.e. Oduche only started going to church two years ago.

On this particular morning the church bell is ringing and Oduche has dressed to attend Sunday service. Ezeulu regrets his decision. When his young son Nwafo interprets the church bells as saying: ‘Leave your yam, leave your cocoyam and come to church’ Ezeulu reflects that this is a ‘song of extermination’ i.e. calling the natives to neglect their work, their farming, their food and, by extension, neglect their traditional culture.

Then one of the family notices a box in Oduche’s hut is moving. To cut a long story short, the church had a new teacher, John Goodcountry, who told the congregation to aggressively overthrow the old customs. One of these was worship of the python who was considered a holy animal. So Oduche decides to kill one of the pythons that live in the roof of his mother’s hut. But when he’s manoeuvred it with a stick down to the ground he is scared of smashing its head in, in case he is cursed, and so manipulates it into a box which he locks, telling himself that it will die but he won’t be responsible for killing it.

It’s this moving box which has freaked the family out. When Ezeulu prizes it open with a spear everyone sees the imprisoned royal python (which quickly slithers to freedom) and word gets round the village that Oduche has committed a great blasphemy.

Ezidemili, the trouble-making priest of Idemili, sends a visitor to Ezeulu to ask what reparation he is going to make for the abomination his son has committed against his god. Ezeulu, incensed at being placed in this position, tells the visitor to return to Ezidemili and tell him to ‘eat shit’. I was surprised at the use of this swearword, as Achebe’s prose is usually so chaste and restrained. Must have had much more force in 1964.

Chapter 5

Back with Captain Winterbottom, his bitternesses and disgruntlements. The British policy is to create local leaders based on tribal values and culture so as to effect indirect rule. Cheaper and better. But Winterbottom thinks it is fake and is creating a generation of petty tyrants.

The great tragedy of British colonial administration was that the man on the spot who knew his African and knew what he was talking about found himself being constantly overruled by starry-eyed fellows at headquarters.

He remembers the case of James Ikedi, a native who he appointed officer for Okperi. After a while Winterbottom learned that this man was abusing his position to take bribes and kickbacks, plus selecting the best young women to take to bed. After 6 months he had to suspend him but then the Senior Resident came back from leave and reinstated him. And then Winterbottom learned that the man had set himself up as king, calling himself His Highness Ikedi the First, Obi of Okperi.

This was what British administration was doing among the Ibos, making a dozen mushroom kings grow where there was none before.

What prompts all this is an overbearing message from the Senior District Officer ticking Winterbottom off for delaying in selecting local chiefs. What makes it worse is that this man used to be Winterbottom’s subordinate but has been promoted over him.

Anyway, if he’s forced to appoint local leaders, he has in mind the chief priest Ezeulu.

Chapter 6

Back in the village Oduche is hiding from his father who is livid with him for trapping the royal python. He eventually returns, afraid, but Ezeulu doesn’t harm him.

Ezeulu’s in-law, Onwuzuligbo, comes to negotiate about the return of the beaten wife, Akueke, to his village. It is a friendly discussion. Ezeulu offers kolanut, Onwuzuligbo draws lines on the ground with white chalk and then colours the big toe of his right foot white. (Only near the end is it explained that these lines are the visitor’s ‘personal emblem’.) The negotiations are quite detailed, including recompense for the year that Ezeulu has been feeding her.

On the back of this Ezeulu sends the town crier around the village to announce the Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves.

Chapter 7

The Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves involves all the villages so on this one day the men of Umuachala and Umunneora meet as friends. We are shown the preparations of Ezeulu’s wives, Matefi, Ugoye, and daughter Akueke. The marketplace is packed. Grand arrival of Nwaka’s five wives, each wearing showy ivory leg decorations and fine velvet.

Then the central ceremony of the Festival which involves the big drum Ikolo and Ezeulu performing various acts, including recounting the story of the arrival of the god Ulu, and then asking the god for purification. There is a lot of running about, plus the women of each of the villages taking it in turn to perform ritual dances, trampling the pumpkin leaves which have been scattered on the floor.

This whole chapter has focused on Ezeulu’s womenfolk, gossiping about each other and in-laws. It ends with Akueke explaining that she is soon to return to her husband who beat her but now the entire village promises will do so no longer.

Chapter 8

Cuts back to the Brits and specifically Mr Wright who is in charge of getting a road built (with local labour) from Okperi to Umuaro, home of the novel’s protagonist Ezeulu. Wright hasn’t enough money to pay the labourers and toys with cutting their wages in order to recruit more. (In details like this Achebe captures the lofty indifference to the natives’ lives of their white masters.)

In the event Wright gets Winterbottom’s permission to recruit unpaid labour from Umuaro. The elders of Umuaro offer Wright two groups who have recently come of age (the natives seem to organise themselves into generations by year group, as at western schools). There’s some jokes about the cordial rivalry between the two groups and the nicknames they give each other, relating to the smallness of their penises.

Moses Unachukwu had been the first Christian convert in the region. Being a carpenter, he helped build the church. All this means he is the only native who speaks English (after a fashion) and so he acts as interpreter between Wright and these new recruits, which increases his kudos throughout the villages.

The story of Ezeulu’s son Obika and his friend Ofoedu being late turning up for the road work assignment because they are hungover from a drinking party the night before (a party which included much knowledgeable discussion of the sources and potency of palm wine). Despite being late Obika swaggers up to the labouring party and provokes Wright to lose his temper and lash out with his whip. Obika charges him but Moses wisely holds him back, then Wright’s assistants hold Obika while Wright gives him six lashes of the whip on his bare shoulders (p.369).

This leads the men to down tools and have a big discussion about whether to carry on working, which stirs up the whole issue of why they’re working for the white man, what right he has to tell them what to do, and so on, quite heated discussions in which Moses, Obika and his trouble-making friend Ofoedu take a leading part. Moses preaches submission because the material and religious power of the white man are unstoppable:

‘I have travelled in Olu and I have travelled in Igbo, and I can tell you that there is no escape from the white man. He has come. When Suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat left for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. The white man is like that. Before any of you here was old enough to tie a cloth between the legs I saw with my own eyes what the white man did to Abame. Then I knew there was no escape. As daylight chases away darkness so will the white man drive away all our customs. I know that as I say it now it passes by your ears, but it will happen. The white man has power which comes from the true God and it bums like fire. This is the God about Whom we preach every eighth day…” (p.371)

(I should explain that this place named Abame was the centre of the local slave trade and when its inhabitants murdered a white man sent to talk to them, the whites returned in force, with African soldiers, and killed every man, woman and child in the place. News of this massacre spread round the region and is routinely invoked whenever anyone suggests any kind of rebellion against white rule.)

Ezeulu hears that his son has been whipped and considers reporting Wright to Winterbottom, but when Obika and Ofoedu arrive back at the compound and admit to being late and drunk and insubordinate, Ezeulu decides not to. He hates Ofoedu, who he considers a ‘worthless young man who trails after his son like a vulture after a corpse’ (p.376).

(Incidentally, we see Ezeulu’s opinion of Wright who, unlike tall and commanding Winterbottom, Ezeulu finds short and thick and hairy as a monkey.)

Chapter 9

The homestead of Edogo and his wife Amoge. Their first child died in a few months and now the second infant is sick, too. He ponders Ezeulu’s partiality for some of his sons over others and wonders who will succeed him as chief priest.

Ezeulu’s old friend and one of the few people he listens to, Ogbuefi Akuebue, comes to visit. This is because Ezeulu is still recovering from his energetic exertions at the Festival. Akuebue carries out the drawing of the four white chalk lines, colouring of the big toe of the right foot.

Nothing very significant comes of this visit. Ezeulu’s sons attend, the youngest, Nwafo, fetching first a kola nut, then some water, Edogo entering, greeting the guest and offering palm wine which has just been sent him by the client who’s commissioned him to carve a wooden door. Akuebue repeats a profound tirbal saying about booze:

‘The only medicine against palm wine is the power to say no.’

As a teetotaller that struck a chord. I think the point of these slow domestic scenes is precisely that, to immerse the reader in the etiquette and manners of these people, every bit as detailed and precise as the ladylike manners of Jane Austen’s characters.

They discuss a bit the fate of Obika being whipped, and discuss whether anyone can know the truth who was not there. A conversation about epistemology and morality.

Chapter 10

Tony Clarke is hosting his boss, Winterbottom, to dinner. Clarke has been in Nigeria for 6 weeks. He’s just back from a tour of the region (also known as the division or district) during which he stayed a night in the official rest house where Wright is staying as he supervises construction of the road, and discovered he likes Wright very much. They have a massive gossip about Winterbottom, uttering the word ‘captain’ with sarcasm. Wright tells Clarke that part of Winterbottom’s problem is that during the Cameroon war of 1916, his wife left him for another man. They go on to agree that ‘Old Tom’ as he’s known is a figure of fun back at headquarters in Enugu.

During the gossip we learn that Winterbottom came out to Africa in 1910 and has been there 16 years. So it must be 1926 (p.391).

All that is told in a flashback, a memory in Clarke’s mind. Achebe uses flashbacks a lot. They add depth to the narrative but also contribute to it being confusing, for example it took me ages to realise that all of chapter 2 with its account of the lead-up to the brief village war, was a flashback.

Back in the present Clarke hosts the dinner (consisting of small dry chicken cooked over a wood fire by his cook). As in almost all the British chapters, there’s a moment symbolising British ignorance and slackness. Winterbottom had specifically asked Clarke to enquire into rumours that Wright was whipping the native workers. Only when he returned does Clarke remember that, despite or because of a boozy evening with Wright, he completely forgot to ask. Anyhow, he didn’t really know how to make enquiries: who should he ask? who would translate for him? who could he trust?

The point is that Clarke therefore wrote in his official report that there was no whipping. Winterbottom is mildly puzzled because word has got to him of the whipping of Obika. On balance, he decides to trust Clarke and his report will enter the official record, but it’s another example of the British authorities not understanding or getting the full story.

Anyway, their little conversation returns to Winterbottom’s bugbear, namely the ill-advised policy of setting up local chiefs, and Winterbottom repeats the story of James Ikedi who, given a little authority, turned himself into a corrupt abuser and now king of his own people.

‘The man was a complete nonentity until we crowned him, and now he carries on as though he had been nothing else all his life. It’s the same with Court Clerks and even messengers. They all manage to turn themselves into little tyrants over their own people. It seems to be a trait in the character of the negro.’

This little speech was probably intended to be hair-raisingly patronising and insulting in the fresh optimistic days of 1964 as African nations were gaining their independence. Now, 60 years later, after tyrants and dictators such as Mobutu and Amin, after Bokassa, Sani Abacha, Mugabe, Macias Nguema, Sekou Toure, Siad Barre, Mengistu, Omar al-Bashir and Hissene Habre, Paul Kagame, Isaias Afwerki, after countless civil wars (Angola, Mozambique, Sudan, Eritrea, Somalia), coups and massacres, it sounds more like a prophecy than a slur.

Chapter 11

Ezeulu visits his friend Ogbuefi Akuebue. Akeubue tells his son, Obielue, to go to his mother and ask for a kola nut, the standard food broken at visits. Akeubue has a back problem which means he can’t straighten up after sitting a long time. In this and a thousand other domestic touches, Achebe humanises his characters, normalises them, seeks to erase the barrier of incomprehension which we see the colonial rulers erecting in the narratives themselves.

During the conversation they hear gunshots which, interestingly, neither man attributes to violence i.e. fighting let alone shooting in anger, are things of vanishing rarity. Instead Ezeulu immediately realises they are shots fired to ward off evil spirits. In other words, someone is seriously ill. It is Ogbuefi Amalu and Ezeulu goes to visit him allowing the text to give us a very detailed description of the traditional medicines, fetishes and objects festooning his room to effect a cure.

A few days later Ezeulu is back at his obi when Obika’s bride arrives, accompanied by all her womenfolk, 20 in total, while Ezeulu’s compound is packed with family and relatives. In other words, a grand occasion. She is named Okuata, is tall and strikingly good looking. Again this is an opportunity to display detailed knowledge not only of the etiquette of such an occasion but what everyone is wearing, especially the bride, her hairstyle, the strings of jigida covering her privates. The full ceremony, including the sacrifice performed by a medicine man, and the anxious thoughts of bride and groom, are thoroughly described.

Unusually, the medicine man, Aniegboka, does not bury the hen the family brought along with the other symbols of the past which must be buried in the roadway back to Okuata’s village, as is the custom, but instead says he will take it home and eat it himself. This worries Obika, who, when the procession returns to his obi, asks his father if this is usual. Ezeulu says no but it is no worry because he performed his part; what the diviner does with the holy objects is not his concern.

But Achebe observes that Ezeulu is mightily pleased that his son was a) concerned about the proprieties and b) asked his father about it i.e. showed reverence and filial duty. Maybe he is growing up now he is married.

Chapter 12

Next morning the newly married and deflowered Okuata is pleased to wear the loincloth of a married woman and immensely relieved that her virginity has been confirmed. Obika sends a goat to her parents in thanks for her ‘virtue’ being intact. It’s probably obvious, but isn’t the entire way women were treated in this society a textbook definition of ‘patriarchy’.

Edogo goes to visit Ezeulu’s friend Akuebue because he is worried about (what he thinks are) his father’s plans for succession to the priesthood i.e. his positioning of Nwafo to inherit it.

Meanwhile, almost the entire extended household went to the stream to fetch water and an argument breaks out. The new bride Okuata pays just a bit too much attention to Oduche the Christian, whereupon his sister Ojiugo rather loudly tells Okuata that this is the infidel who killed the royal python, which infuriates Obika who confronts Ojiugo, who slaps him, who beats her back, and the entire family has to separate them. They and onlookers take sides and there are further micro-disputes.

Obviously, when Ojiuga gets home, crying, with slap marks on her face, her mother Matefi sets up a loud howling prompting Ezeulu to stride into her hut and tell her to ‘shut your mouth’ (p.415). In my Conclusion I suggest the book has many more characters, with their own storylines, than the previous two novels and this makes it rather like a soap opera.

His friend Akuebue visits Ezeulu, ostensibly to talk about Oduche but the conversation spills out into a rehash of the clan’s accusations that five years ago, in the little village war, Ezeulu betrayed his clan to the white men. This triggers a lengthy justification from Ezeulu, saying the coming of the white man and the overpowering of their people is nothing to do with him. It was nothing to do with him when the white man massacred Abame. And now, it is absurd of people like his enemy Nakwa to blame him, Ezeulu, for the rise of the white man. Do they think that if they overthrow or kill Ezeulu, the white man will go away? Of course not. Leading up to Ezeulu’s comment on himself:

‘I can see things where other men are blind. That is why I am Known and at the same time I am Unknowable. You are my friend and you know whether I am a thief or a murderer or an honest man. But you cannot know the Thing which beats the drum to which Ezeulu dances. I can see tomorrow; that is why I can tell Umuaro: come out from this because there is death there or do this because there is profit in it. If they listen to me, o-o; if they refuse to listen, o-o. I have passed the stage of dancing to receive presents.’ (p.419)

Akuebue realises that Ezeulu sent his son Oduche to the church not as a sellout of the clan but as a sacrifice to staunch the white man’s power.

To everyone’s astonishment a black messenger from Winterbottom arrives, dressed in a fancy uniform. After a fuss of etiquette, he announces that Winterbottom has summoned him to go to Okperi. He then throws in some corruption, saying that Winterbottom is busy to Ezeulu might have to wait several days but if he gives the messenger a big meal, he’ll make sure he’s seen the next day. Ezeulu is calm and dignified and says he goes nowhere to attend anyone; Winterbottom must come to him. The messenger is outraged. Ezeulu offers that his son Edogo will go in his stead. The messenger refuses to take the message.

Chapter 13

Ezeulu calls a big meeting of the six villages. As usual the formalities and etiquette are described in some detail. First Ezeulu describes to them the arrival of the white man’s messenger. Then there is a general debate in which his enemy, Nwaku, is predictably critical. And then Ezeulu concludes proceedings by saying he will travel to Okperi to see Winterbottom.

Description of the estrangement between Ezeulu who became a priest and his half-brother, Okeke Onenyi who inherited their father’s skills as a medicine man. Family soap opera. Okeke is fond of his nephew, Edogo, which is part of the reason Ezeulu dislikes them both.

Cut to a complete change of scene. Winterbottom is coming down with his annual bout of fever. He brags about being an ‘old coaster’ to Clarke who is shrewd enough to realise that, as the new boy, he needs to act impressed. He is just tipping over when he receives the message that Ezeulu refused to accede to his summons. In a fury Winterbottom orders that officers be sent to arrest Ezeulu, bring him to Okperi, and throw him in prison until Winterbottom has returned from the visit he’s planning to make to headquarters in Enugu. But then he falls into a delirium and is taken to hospital.

In the hospital he is treated by the missionary doctor Mary Savage who inadvertently reveals the fact to the local staff that she adores the sick man.

Meanwhile, two officers are dispatched to arrest and bring back Ezeulu, in handcuffs if necessary. After much prevarication by the villages, they find Ezeulu’s compound and, after terrifying the family, finally establish that Ezeulu has already departed and is heading for Okperi. Now the two messengers are afraid of looking like fools, and so decide they will take two members of the family back with them as security, to be released as and when Ezeulu appears. Old Akuebue talks them out of this with a counter-offer of gifts, so they are presented with a feast of yam and chicken and palm wine, given two live cocks and two shillings. Here as in all other dealings with the so-called Court Messengers, as in the career of James Ikedi, you can see how the presence of the white man encouraged black-on-black corruption and extortion which hadn’t been there before, which tribal customs and processes had prevented. The white man brings the threat of arbitrary and extreme violence which his middle men can use to extort gifts from terrified villagers.

Meanwhile all the natives on Government Hill connect the fact that Winterbottom fell seriously ill just after ordering the arrest of the Chief Priest of Ulu as proof of Ezeulu’s power, proud of the might of their customs despite the white man’s bullying.

Clarke returns from the hospital anxious for Winterbottom’s life so when his steward tells him that Ezeulu has arrived, he irritably orders him to be locked up. All the black staff on Government Hill are now terrified of Ezeulu’s power. So the officers of the guardhouse sweep it out and pretend it is a guest room for Ezeulu and Obika. Their wives bring lots of food which Ezeulu refuses.

Then two messengers who went to Umuora are revealed as frauds because Ezeulu got there under his own steam without them. What’s more, they begin to suspect they might be liable to Ezeulu’s magic and so consult an old dibia (medicine man) who tells them to bury the two cocks and the money Ezeulu’s family gave them.

Thus great fear of Ezeulu’s power spreads through the entire black staff on Government Hill, their families and villages.

Chapter 14

Later that night Ezeulu has a dream-vision of his grandfather confronting the obstinate men of Umuora, of the villagers of Umuora as his enemy.

Clarke decides to follow through on Winterbottom’s feverish determination to teach Ezeulu some manners and so leaves him in prison for four days. En route to the hospital he and Wade come across a more than usually lavish sacrifice (the same cocks and money the two messengers dedicated) and stop to examine it. When Wade sees the money, he pockets it. Clarke is alarmed at this desecration of a native offering.

Initially hostile to the clansman who had brought the messenger to his compound and is now looking after him in ‘prison’, John Nwodika, the latter’s insistence on being a good host and getting his wife to prepare fulsome meals brings him round.

Obika returns to Umuora. As you can imagine every member of the family is alarmed and upset. We have gotten to know them so well that we register the different responses of each one. When Akuebue hears the Ezeulu is being fed by the wife of Nwodika, he instantly declares he is setting off to see Ezeulu. He doesn’t trust the people of Okperi one inch.

So later that day his son, wife (Ugoye) and friend (Akuebue) arrive at the prison. They find Ezeulu extremely relaxed about his extended stay. He jokes that if the white man dies and requires him to be sacrificed that will be fine, though his family immediately let out storms of protest.

Winterbottom’s steward, John Nwodika, the man who’s been looking after Ezeulu now tells them all the story of how he came into the white man’s service and then his excitement at promoting his clan (Umuora).

Ezeulu has come to trust Nwodika. Edogo is grateful to him for looking after his father. So they perform the ceremony to become blood brothers, namely breaking a kola nut, cutting their thumbs and smearing some blood on a nut, then eating the nut smeared with the other’s blood.

Eventually, after being kept waiting four days, Ezeulu is summoned to the presence of Clarke who treats him disrespectfully before finally getting round to telling Ezeulu that the British want to make him the warrant chief of Umuaro. There’s a silence then Ezeulu says he will nobody’s chief except Ulu’s. Infuriated, Clarke has him sent back to the cells.

Chapter 15

Word gets around that Ezeulu has refused to be the white man’s puppet. Clarke goes to see Winterbottom who’s been in hospital for two weeks and looks very ill and weak. Apprised of the situation, Winterbottom tells Clarke to keep the priest locked up till he caves in and co-operates with the administration. Clarke is relieved not to have to make the decision but troubled by the lack of legal justification for locking up an old man who’s done nothing wrong.

After 32 days during which his reputation has spread far and wide, Ezeulu is told he is free to leave. All through this period he has not cared about the white man’s decisions at all – it is the battle with his own people he is determined to win. He wants to lay to rest forever the accusation made by Nakwa and his ilk that Ezeulu collaborated with the white man and even brought the white man to Umuora. Now nobody can say he is a collaborator.

Clarke took the decision to release Ezeulu partly on his own, partly influenced by a letter from a report by the Secretary for Native Affairs recommending that the policy of appointing new chiefs be suspended.

Chapter 16

So Ezeulu sets out for Umuaro, accompanied by the faithful John Nwodika who wouldn’t hear of him making the long journey alone. En route the rains start, really heavy continuous freezing cold rain, so that Ezeulu arrives home drenched, much to the concern of his kin.

They warm him, rub him with oils, and he has over 50 visitors, not counting women. For most of the time he leans against the wall not saying anything, letting his friend Akuebue answer all their questions. When he was at Okperi the entire village seemed to be The Enemy, but once he’s back he hears all kinds of conflicting opinions (especially on the key issue of whether to confront the white man or not) and realises it’s not so simple.

Suddenly Ezeulu has a religious revelation, a key moment which changes his entire attitude to himself and the problem of his enmity with his own people. The god Ulu speaks in his ear and berates him for thinking that this is his fight. What if he is only part of a wider plan? Ulu explains that he has his own fight with another deity, Idemili.

Since it’s at the core of the narrative and its interpretation it’s worth quoting at length:

‘Ta! Nwanu!’ barked Ulu in his ear, as a spirit would in the ear of an impertinent human child. ‘Who told you that this was your own fight?’

Ezeulu trembled and said nothing.

‘I say who told you that this was your own fight which you could arrange to suit you? You want to save your friends who brought you palm wine he-hehe-he-he!’ laughed the deity the way spirits do – a dry, skeletal laugh. ‘Beware you do not come between me and my victim or you may receive blows not meant for you! Do you not know what happens when two elephants fight? Go home and sleep and leave me to settle my quarrel with Idemili, who wants to destroy me so that his python may come to power. Now you tell me how it concerns you. I say go home and sleep. As for me and Idemili we shall fight to the finish; and whoever throws the other down will strip him of his anklet!’

After that there was no more to be said. Who was Ezeulu to tell his deity how to fight the jealous cult of the sacred python? It was a fight of the gods. He was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god. This thought intoxicated Ezeulu like palm wine. New thoughts tumbled over themselves and past events took on new, exciting significance. Why had Oduche imprisoned a python in his box? It had been blamed on the white man’s religion; but was that the true cause? What if the boy was also an arrow in the hand of Ulu? (p.476)

He should stop worrying and agonising about scruples and details. His god has a plan. He is just a part of it.

Chapter 17

You might have expected the white people to make an appearance, maybe Clarke to send more soldiers, and relations with them become more fraught, as they do at the end of Things Fall Apart – the whole situation building up to some grisly climax… But no. Back in Umuora life returns to normal.

Life went on as though nothing had happened or was ever going to happen.

Achebe summarises the way each of the family members carries on being themselves (having gotten his new wife pregnant, Obika returns to his normal behaviour of drinking too much palm wine). The six villages celebrate their various festivals. The rains stop, allowing the yam tubers to ripen.

The chapter then turns into a very detailed, evocative, immersive description of the inauguration of the new Mask Edogo has spent a lot of the narrative carving. A huge crowd assembles to watch the procession accompanied by flute and led by Obika, by far the most handsome manly man in the village, then the ritual slaughter of the two rams. It is a masterful description.

Chapter 18 – the crisis

It approaches the Feast of the New Yam which marks the new year. Emissaries from the six villages visit Ezeulu to tell him they are worried that 12 moons have passed and he has not set the date for the feast. Ezeulu reprimands them for infringing on his powers but when they leave he is youthful and gay. He is going to get his own back on the village which ignored his advice all those years ago.

Word gets round that Ezeulu is refusing to name the day of the feast and so ten wise men come to see him. Argument. They say that delaying setting the feast time will delay harvesting, their yams will rot in the ground and they will all starve. Ezeulu for his part says he still has three holy yams left to eat before he can declare the date. The point is that he only eats these yams at the arrival of each new moon. So his ruling implies everyone will have to wait two more months before harvesting their yams. Well, can’t he eat them all on one day, the elders ask? Don’t be ridiculous, that would be blasphemy. Well, can’t the elders take the blasphemy and penance on themselves? Various attempts to solve the issue, until they leave.

It turns into a real issue. Ezeulu’s delay means the people of the six village of Umuaro will have to wait two more moons before harvesting their yams, their main crop. Meanwhile the rains come to an end, the earth hardens and the harvesting becomes daily more difficult.

Ezeulu becomes public enemy number one. His family are sneered at. His grandchildren are called names. Women refuse to sell his wives goods in the market. Elders of the villages discuss the rights and wrongs of his behaviour. Ogbuefi Ofoka shrewdly observes that Eleuzu has been spoiling for a fight with Umuora for some time, and now this has given him the opportunity.

Abruptly the focus of the narrative shifts completely to the local Christian church, run by the zealous John Jaja Goodcountry, Catechist of Still Mark’s C.M.S. Church, Umuaro. Achebe gives a complicated account of the fortunes of Goodcountry’s church, which takes in events in other districts, religious conflicts with the natives etc. The point is, Goodcountry hears about the growing controversy about the Feast of the New Yams and sees it as an opportunity for recruitment.

He has it put around that anyone who brings one yam to the Christian church will win the support of the Christian God who is far more powerful than Ulu, and who will permit them to then commence their harvesting (which has been dangerously delayed by Ezeulu’s obstinacy).

Chapter 19

Ezeulu’s obstinacy has resulted in famine. The neighbouring peoples to Umuaro are making a fortune selling them yams at market while Umuaro’s own yams rot in the ground unharvested. An eminent man dies but his family cannot hold a wake because there are no yams.

A deadly silence descends on the famine-stricken village. Nobody visits Ezeulu. A new moon comes and Ezeulue eats the twelfth yam, But there is still a whole 28 days till he eats the last one and the harvest can begin. People will be starving by then.

The climax is dense and spooky. the family of Ogbuefi Amalu who died in the rainy season approach fine handsome Obika to perform the role of ogbazulobodo on the night before the dead man’s second burial. The performance requires him to adopt the personality of the spirit and then race through all the pathways of the village repeating time-honoured proverbs. Although Ezeulu’s family is unpopular, Obika is still the best at running and chanting, and so he accepts the invitation.

As usual, a detailed and utterly convincing description of the preparation of the ritual, Obika’s dressing and then becoming the spirit and setting off running. But he returns to the preparers and mourners much sooner than expected and collapses at their feet and dies.

They bring Obika’s body to Ezeulu. He breaks. Why did the god do this to him? He followed his rules to the letter. Why has he been punished? Lost in the endless labyrinth of theology, Ezeulu cracks and goes mad, like his mother before him.

The very end of the narrative (like that of Things Fall Apart) returns to the whites. Winterbottom had been recuperating from his illness in England. Now he returns to his post, marries the doctor and never even hears a word of Ezeulu’s fate. The entire complex story with its numerous interlocking relationships, its entire world of values and motivations, simply doesn’t exist for the white rulers. But:

It looked as though the gods and the powers of event finding Winterbottom handy had used him and left him again in order as they found him.

So was he, also, part of Ulu’s plan? Was Winterbottom, also, an arrow of god?

What happened?

So what happened in the central storyline? There are six possible interpretations:

1. Was Ezeulu right to follow his interpretation of his religious duty, to hold out to the letter of the law dictating that he only eat one of the holy yams per month, and thus throwing the village he was meant to be protecting into crisis? Was there no compromise, no way he could have eaten the other two yams on the same day and blamed the elders, who would have done penance to appease Ulu? I.e. was he only doing his duty?

Or 2, was he being obstinate and taking advantage of the crisis in order to wilfully punish the village he had a grudge against? I.e. was the situation caused by his obstinacy?

Or 3, was it all the white man’s fault? By arresting him and keeping him in prison on Government Hill for just over a month, through two new moons (which he couldn’t celebrate by eating the holy yams set aside for each one) was it white man’s interference in the natural scheme of things which caused the crisis?

Or 4, as per Ezeulu’s vision of Ulu, was this all part of Ulu’s plan which Ezeulu didn’t agree with but which he had to follow. Was Ezeulu just a pawn in the god’s larger plans, an arrow of god, in which case the six villages themselves, and the famine they suffered, were all part of some larger plan which no mortal could understand?

Or 5, did the god punish Ezeulu for taking against the village the god exists to protect? In the villagers’ opinion:

Their god had taken sides with them against his headstrong and ambitious priest and thus upheld the wisdom of their ancestors – that no man however great was greater than his people; that no man ever won judgement against his clan. (p.512)

Lastly, 6, the novel ends with the thought that the only ones to benefit from the situation were the Christians. Many families ignored Ezeulu’s ruling and took advantage of John Goodcountry’s offer, taking a yam to sacrifice to the Christian god in the hope that this would supersede the blasphemy done to Ulu. In other words, the entire complex tangled sequence of events turns out to be just a footnote in the white man’s cultural and religious conquest of Igboland.

Traditional sayings

Part of the power and authority of Things Fall Apart derives from the wealth of folk stories and, especially, traditional sayings or proverbs which the characters utter as a regular part of their dialogue. There are so many, it gives an impression of a great plenitude, that there’s an indefinite storehouse of folk wisdom to draw on.

The thing is, some of these recur in No Longer At Ease. And the same ones occur again in Arrow of God. This rather undermines the initial impression of a huge storehouse, and begins to give the impression of the opposite, of a finite set of saying which are endlessly regurgitated by characters. In all three books occurs the saying about the little bird, nza, who ate and drank and got over-confident and challenged his personal god to single combat. There’s also the proverb about the outsiders who weep louder than family at the funeral. And then the story of the bird Eneke-nti-oba. When his friends asked him why he was always on the wing he replied: ‘Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.’

‘When an adult is in the house the she-goat is not left to suffer the pains of parturition on its tether.’ (cited three times in chapter 2, in chapters 13 and 18)
‘When the roof and walls of a house fall in, the ceiling is not left standing’ (quoted twice, in chapters 2 and 8)

For reference, I’ll publish a list of all these wisdom sayings in my next blog post.

Conclusion

There are many more characters in Arrow of God than Achebe’s previous books and they’re more densely crowded. It’s not only longer, it feels a lot more busy. And unlike the first two books it doesn’t focus so much on one central protagonist. Instead the extra length allows Achebe to describe in much more detail other characters such as Ezeulu’s wives and children, his sons and daughters. There are also many more sub-plots, for example, about the domestic abuse of his daughter Akueke, or Oduche attending the Christian church, or Obika being a swaggering braggart, or descriptions of the quiet son, Edogo, as he works on the Mask he is carving. It feels more like a soap opera, with multiple characters and storylines all going on at the same time, alternating and interweaving.

This made Arrow of God significantly harder to read than the first two books, which are shorter and more focused, with just the one central storyline concentrating on the protagonist. At quite a few places I got lost and had to reread paragraphs or pages to figure out who was doing what and what was going on.

So it’s a harder and more demanding read than the first two. But, on the plus side, being longer and more copious than its predecessors means the reader is more thoroughly immersed in the range and diversity of native life, immensely immersed, soaked.

Maybe this is why Achebe, many years later, wrote in a brief foreword that Arrow of God was his favourite among his novels. It feels the most encyclopedic, giving a really comprehensive overview of the tribal life and customs of the time. It stands alongside Things Fall Apart as a mighty achievement.

Credit

Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe was published in by Heinemann Books in 1964. References are to the 2010 Everyman’s Library edition.

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by Simon on January 19, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel

Tagged Abame, Adeze, African Trilogy, Akuebue, Akueke, Amoge, Aniegboka, Arrow of God, Breaker of Guns, British colonial administration, British Empire, Cameroon, Captain Winterbottom, chief priest, Chinua Achebe, Christian church, Christianity, cocoyam, colonialism, Court Messengers, dibia, District Officer, Edogo, Eneke-nti-oba, Enugu, Ezeulu, Ezidemili, famine, Festival of the Pumpkin Leaves, fiction, First World War, folk stories, George Allen, Government Hill, head wife, His Highness Ikedi the First, hubris, Ibe, Idemili, Igboland, ikenga, James Ikedi, John Goodcountry, John Jaja Goodcountry, John Nwodika, kola nut, kolanut, Lagos, Mary Savage, Mask Edogo, masks, Matefi, medicine man, Moses Unachukwu, Mr Clarke, narrative, Nigeria, Nkechi, No Longer at Ease, novel, Nwafo, Nwaka, Nwodika, nza, obi, Obi of Okperi, Obi Okonkwo, Obiageli, Obika, Oduche, Ofoedu, ogbazulobodo, Ogbuefi Akuebue, Ogwugwu, Ojiugo, Okeye Onenyi, Okonkwo, Okperi, Okuata, Old Tom, Onwuzuligbo, Otiji-Egbe, Otikpo, palm-wine, personal fetish, proverbs, racism, religion, Roberts, sacred python, Secretary for Native Affairs, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, Things Fall Apart, Tony Clarke, Traditional sayings, Tragedy, Udo, Uduezue, Ugoye, Ulu, Umuachala, Umuagu, Umuaro, Umuezeani, Umunneora, Umuofia, Umuogwugwu, Wade, Winterbotta, Winterbottom, Wright, yam

Posted by Simon on January 19, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/01/19/arrow-of-god-chinua-achebe/

A World In Common: Contemporary African Photography @ Tate Modern

This is an outstanding, wonderful exhibition bringing together some 150 photographs (and a few installations and videos) by no fewer than 36 photographers and artists from across Africa. It is full of breath-taking and beautiful works, suggesting a continent alive with wonderfully creative, innovative artists.

It’s divided into three ‘chapters’, each of which are sub-divided into themes. To quote the curators:

The first chapter is rooted in ancient African cultures and traditions which have survived periods of struggle and resistance. Inspired by Pan-African liberation movements, the second chapter looks at photography’s ability to produce counter histories – archival practices and the agency of photographer and subject are brought into focus. The third chapter explores the impact of globalisation and the climate emergency.

Chapter 1: Identity and tradition

Queens, Kings and Gods

For centuries Africa was conquered and colonised by European countries. The artists in room one pay tribute to the monarchs and matriarchs who resisted colonial conquest and occupation. The photographers here invoke the heritage of kingdoms such as the Asante of Ghana and the Yoruba of Nigeria, who are descended from the goddesses and gods of the ancient spiritual capital, Ilé-Ifẹ̀. Thus a series of big, beautifully clear portraits of traditional monarchs of the present day by George Osodi (born Nigeria 1974).

Installation view of ‘Nigerian Monarchs’ series by George Osodi (2012 to 2022) in ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern (photo by the author)

There is a set from the ‘We Live in Silence; sequence by Kudzanai Chiurai (born 1981, Zimbabwe) which elaborately recreates biblical narratives, history painting and Christian iconography which themselves turn out to be scenes from the 1967 film, ‘Soleil Ô’, by Mauritanian-born French filmmaker Med Hondo. So, worlds within worlds…

We Live in Silence IV by Kudzanai Chiurai (2017) courtesy of the artist and the Goodman Gallery © Kudzanai Chiurai

Spiritual worlds

The next room gestures towards the complex and diverse history of religion across this vast continent. There’s a set of photographic self portraits by Khadija Saye (1992 to 2017, born and worked in the UK, of Gambian heritage). You might recall that it was one of these photos that British artist Chris Ofili used as the centrepiece for his huge new site-specific Requiem for Grenfell Tower at Tate Britain. In this sequence Saye photographed herself performs a series of rituals using sacred objects that combine her African, Christian and Islamic heritage.

Installation view of the ‘Dwelling: in the space we breathe’ series by Khadija Saye (2017) (photo by the author)

At the end of the room is a stunning work, a set of five huge digital photos arranged to create a striking tableau by Maïmouna Guerresi (born 1951, born in Italy, works in Senegal). Titled ‘M-eating – Students and Teacher’ it shows four girls and an older man sitting around a long table draped in a yellow cloth. The wall behind the table is inscribed with the Basmala, a Muslim prayer recited to elicit God’s blessings. It’s a huge and really powerful image of absorption and contemplation but, more than that, it’s just a beautifully clear and vividly coloured composition.

‘M-eating – students and teacher’ by Maïmouna Guerresi (2012) Courtesy of the artist and Mariane Ibrahim

Masks

The next room is devoted to the role of masks in African religion, ritual, folklore and culture. There’s a stunning series by Edson Chagas (born 1977 in Angola), the Tipo Passe series of sitters wearing contemporary clothes but traditional Bantu masks. ‘Tipo passe’ is Portuguese for passport and the frontal composition references passport photography.

Installation view of the ‘Tipo Passe’ series by Edson Chagas (2014) (Photo by the author)

Opposite these is a series of really wonderful photos by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (born 1965, works in Benin), instances from the Egungun series.

Installation view of ‘Egungun’ series by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou (photo by the author)

As the curators explain:

Egungun is a Yoruba masquerade practice which calls upon the spirits of departed ancestors. Through ceremonial drumming and dance, ancestral spirits inhabit the bodies of Egungun practitioners to pass on blessings and guide the passage of the dead to the spirit world. Clothing plays an important role in Egungun masquerade – elaborate masks and fabrics must completely seal the performer’s body. Agbodjélou’s performers wear costumes which layer expensive foreign materials and traditional Yoruba cloth. This combination of the traditional and the contemporary parallels the Egungun’s complex role as mediators between the world of the living and the dead.

They’re absolutely stunning, vivid photos.

Untitled from the ‘Egungun’ series by Leonce Raphael Agbodjélou

There’s a massive video piece by Wura-Natasha Ogunji titled ‘Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman?’ and showing women dressed in colourful (traditional?) clothes, dragging kegs of water roped to their ankles through the backstreets of Lagos. Here’s a clip:

You may not be altogether surprised to learn that it’s a feminist piece. Their costumes evoke images of Egungun masquerade, a Yoruba practice that manifests ancestors’ spirits and is traditionally reserved for men, and Ogunji explains the piece is designed to question the heavy labour still done by many women in traditional societies.

Chapter 2: Counter Histories

The next room is big with a lot going on. Along one wall is a series of relatively small ‘family portraits’. These loving portraits of family members gesture towards the long history of studio portraiture that gave agency to African photographers and their sitters, letting them create domestic alternatives to the imperial rhetoric of colonial postcards, posters and magazines. These included pioneering photographers such as James Barnor in Ghana and Lazhar Mansouri in Algeria, photographing families and individuals who would gather proudly to have their portraits taken, often for the first time. All fair enough, but they’re relatively small and struggle to compete with the other, enormous offerings in the same space.

Most striking is the large assembly of old box files arranged on a pebbly red base. This is ‘A History of a City in a Box’ by Ndidi Dike (born UK, works in Nigeria). These old file boxes are filled with archival documents, including colonial-era postcards and photographs, and then carefully choreographed on sand and soil. It is a general metaphor for the way information was power for the old colonial authorities and was hidden away in files and folders but then, during the period of independence, colonial archives were abandoned, hidden and destroyed. And yet…that information decayed, became irrelevant, barely concealing the true earth of the country, its geological bedrock, symbolising the country’s real roots.

Installation view of ‘A History of a City in a Box’ by Ndidi Dike in room 4 of ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern © Tate (Lucy Green)

In the centre, at the back of n this photo, you can see a set of four figures, blown-up and pasted onto cardboard bases, these are the work of Samson Kambalu (born 1975 in Malawi, works in the UK). They’re actually cardboard cut-outs of African soldiers use photographs sourced from the Weston Library in Oxford, UK. They represent the unnamed infantry who fought for the British Empire during the First and Second World Wars and were known as the King’s African Rifles. The cardboard indicates the soldiers’ expendable status to colonial powers. Behind them is a patchwork of quilts inspired by Kambalu’s childhood memories of collecting bubblegum cards of world flags.

Next to them, on the right, you can see a sequence of three big pieces. These are from the sequence ‘Figures’ by Malala Andrialavidrazana (born 1971 in Madagascar, works in France). These are collages of maps, fragments of bank notes, record sleeves and other archival documents which build up into complex, evocative collages. The maps are, as you might expect, old-style colonial-era maps, the idea being that maps were used by the imperial countries to define and control; while the images are of strong African figures, including striking portraits of ancient Egyptian queen Nefertiti and Zairean dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. These are strong, highly impactful images.

‘Figures 1861’ by Malala Andrialavidrazana (2016) at ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern © Malala Andrialavidrazana

Away on the opposite side of the room is a large alcove with a distinctive black-and-white tiled floor, containing three big vivid sets of photographs by three different photographers.

They are, from left to right, four photos by Ruth Ginika Ossai (Nigeria), three by Hassan Hajjaj (Morocco) and four by Atong Atem (born 1994 in South Sudan, works in Australia).

Ruth Ginika Ossai’s portraits are carefully staged on floormats made of Astroturf and parquet-style laminate flooring. The backdrops are inspired by the special effects featured in Igbo gospel music videos and Nollywood films and give them a super-real feel.

The central three are by Hassan Hajjaj in a series called ‘Kesh Angels’ (named after the Hells Angels and the city’s motorbike culture). These are brilliant. The women are not only wearing vivid djellabas and veils but are posed in deliberately in-yer-face, take-no-**** attitudes. To cap it all, the frames are inset with tins of popular products, one appears to be lamb meat, another of tomato juice. So they’re stylish, stroppy, modern and funny.

Installation view of ‘Kesh Angels’ by Hassan Hajjaj (photo by the author)

To the right of the Kesh Angels are four portraits by Atong Atem. Atem portrays friends who are fellow members of Australia’s African diaspora. She says: This body of work honours the South Sudanese Dinka tradition of record-keeping and archiving as an intimate cultural practice.’ Aren’t they beautiful, brightly colourful, densely patterned, vibrantly alive?

Chapter 3: Imagined Futures

The final room contains yet more series of really strong photographs. The theme is the environmental challenges facing Africa, specifically its overpopulated cities and its degraded environment plus, of course, the heating up and drying out caused by global warming.

Kiripi Katembo (1979 to 2015, born and worked the Democratic Republic of the Congo) discovered that people in his home town of Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, didn’t like being photographed. But he could get away with photographing their reflections in the city’s countless large puddles and pools of water. Often these contained rocks or building rubble, but Katembo discovered that the intrusion of these objects into the crystal clear reflections created an interesting disturbance. As the curators describe it: usually depicted as a chaotic and busy capital, ‘here Kinshasa appears as a dream-like landscape populated by shadows and unidentified objects.’

Installation view of ‘Un regard’ by Kiripi Katembo (photo by the author)

There’s a striking series of large black and white photos by Mário Macilau (born 1984, born and works in Mozambique). These, as the images instantly convey, document the workers of the Hulene landfill site in Maputo, Mozambique. Obviously it shows human beings reduced to picking through rubbish to glean a living, and, of course, affected by the toxic substances released into the air and soil by the widespread practice of burning.

Related to the same topic of environmental destruction, but in a completely different register, is a series of 3 wonderful photos by Fabrice Monteiro (born 1972 in Belgium, works in Senegal). They’re from his ‘Prophecies’ series and they are absolutely brilliant.

Untitled #1 (2013) from ‘The Prophecy’ series 2013 to 2015 by Fabrice Monteiro in ‘World in Common’ at Tate Modern

‘The Prophecy’ series captures environmental issues facing communities in Dakar, Senegal, from forest fires to coastal erosion. Spookily tall spiritual figures, inspired by West African masquerade and animism, rise up out of the rubbish dumps, themselves made of rubbish and detritus. They’re stunning.

And next to them is arguably the best set in the show, the ones the curators have (wisely) chosen as the posters, a set of four quite stunning, beautifully, staged, semi-abstract photos by Aïda Muluneh (born and works in Ethiopia, 1974).

Installation view of ‘Water Life’ series by Aïda Muluneh, being (top row): The Shackles of Limitation, Steps (bottom row): Star Shine Moon Glow and The Sorrows We Bear

These were commissioned by the charity Water Aid and depict – in an obviously highly stylised way – ‘rural water access and its impact on women’s rights, well-being and education.’ The impact of global warming will obviously further degrade access to drinking water for hundreds of millions of people in the poorest countries. But clearly the thing here is Muluneh’s stunning use of a limited palette of bright blue and red, and her incorporation of traditional African body painting and dress.

Epilogue

The final (small-ish, corridor-like) room in the exhibition hosts videos by two artists. On the whole I don’t like videos. I don’t have the patience – the photos I’ve highlighted earlier in the show all make their impacts with dramatic immediacy whereas art videos are, by and large, extremely slow.

The most striking is ‘In Praise of Still Boys’ by Julianknxx (born 1988 in Sierra Leone, works in the UK).

The 3 or 4 minutes of this I sat and watched featured lots of footage of a very young Queen Elizabeth II visiting somewhere in Africa (Freetown?), white British sailors steering a motor launch through canoes rowed by local Africans, then British troops from the (I’m guessing) 2000 intervention in Sierra Leone (almost none of this is shown in the trailer, above). And this harking on about the British colonial legacy prompted the train of thought which follows in my political commentary on the exhibition.

Political commentary

I hugely enjoyed this impressive, wide-ranging exhibition about African photography as an aesthetic i.e. visual and psychological experience. But aesthetics and politics are far apart, at least in this exhibition and Tateworld more generally. As political analysis or commentary, this exhibition was rubbish. Dire. Seriously misleading. On and on and on and on and on the curators go about ‘colonialism’ which, for most of these countries, ended in the 1960s, 60 years ago, and on and on and on the curators and the artists go about the Atlantic Slave Trade, which Britain banned in 1807, 216 years ago.

In chapter 3 the curators optimistically claim that the featured artists ‘imagine multiple futures’ and cite Senegalese academic, musician and writer Felwine Sarr (born 1972) who calls for ‘Africans to think and formulate their own future’. In his 2016 book Afrotopia, Sarr writes:

‘Africa has always been the object of discourse by others. Now is the time to dream this utopia in Africa itself, to design Africa ourselves, to think, and to act for ourselves.’

Which immediately prompts two objections. 1) Dreaming isn’t going to get you anywhere, buddy. Practical policies might. See Paul Collier’s list of practical steps in his hard-headed book ‘The Bottom Billion’.

But more relevantly to this exhibition, 2) there’s almost nothing about the future, instead there is a sustained, deep immersion in the legacy of colonialism. Loads of the 36 photographers’ work is directly about colonialism, the colonial legacy, colonial control, colonial archives, ‘the colonial gaze’, colonial images, colonial photography, colonial identity cards, colonial posters, colonial postcards. The word ‘colonial’ occurs 26 times on the wall labels. Even if the artist isn’t themselves addressing it, you can bet the curators will drag in a reference to slavery or colonialism or both in their wall labels.

In other words, the overall effect of the exhibition is immensely backward-looking. It’s like a traumatised adult condemned to act out the abuse of their childhood again and again, with no hope of escape. Maps of colonial Africa, footage of colonial Africa, old box files from colonial Africa, old derelict buildings from colonial Africa, trying to escape from the Christian religion imposed by colonial Africa. Backwards backwards, everything relates backwards to a lost era of 60 years ago.

Here’s a timeline of the year and date African nations gained independence, just to make clear how long ago this all was.

24 December 1951: Libya
1 January 1956: Sudan
2 March 1956: Morocco
20 March 1956: Tunisia
6 March 1957: Ghana
2 October 1958: Guinea

1 January 1960: Cameroon
27 April 1960: Togo
26 June 1960: Madagascar
30 June 1960: DR Congo
1 July 1960: Somalia
1 August 1960: Benin
3 August 1960: Niger
5 August 1960: Burkina Faso
7 August 1960: Côte d’Ivoire
11 August 1960: Chad
13 August 1960: Central African Republic
15 August 1960: Congo
17 August 1960: Gabon
20 August 1960: Senegal
22 September 1960: Mali
1 October 1960: Nigeria
28 November 1960: Mauritania

27 April 1961: Sierra Leone
31 May 1961: South Africa

1 July 1962: Rwanda
1 July 1962: Burundi
3 July 1962: Algeria
9 October 1962: Uganda

12 December 1963: Kenya

24 April 1964: Tanzani (Tanganyika 9 December 1961 – Zanzibar 10 December 1963)
6 July 1964: Malawi
24 October 1964: Zambia

18 February 1965: Gambia

30 September 1966: Botswana
4 October 1966: Lesotho

We’re talking about the era of Sputnik. The era when the Berlin Wall was going up. Before the Beatles’ first LP. That is the era, of the 1940s and 50s, which so many of these artists, at least in their Tate interpretation, are harking back to, again and again and again.

This obviously indicates a glaring great gap, two gaps if you like, which are: 1) what happened in Africa during the 60 years since independence and 2) what is happening in Africa today?

Sixty years of mismanagement, civil war, famine and genocide

One wall label sports a quote from Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana, the first British African colony to become independent in 1957.

‘We believe in the rights of all peoples to govern themselves. We affirm the right of all colonial peoples to control their own destiny. All colonies must be free from foreign imperialist control.’

Nkrumah overflowed with utopian quotes about how socialism would bring peace and plenty to Africa, he was full of them (see the references to Nkrumah in my review of ‘The State of Africa: A History of the Continent Since Independence‘ by Martin Meredith).

What the Tate wall label does not mention is that Nkrumah went on to become a steadily more repressive figure, passing emergency laws, outlawing the opposition, creating a cult of personality, having himself referred to as the ‘the Man of Destiny’, ‘the Star of Africa’, ‘His High Dedication of Redeemer’ and so on. He was an outspoken supporter of the Soviet Union and Mao’s China, receiving a Lenin Prize, tried to abolish tribalism and wasted money on vast white elephant building schemes. He made himself very unpopular with the rulers of neighbouring African countries when it was discovered that he was supporting various communist and guerrilla movements to overthrow their capitalist governments. In 1966 Nkrumah was himself overthrown in a coup by the army which set about de-Sovietising the economy and reversing most of his calamitous economic policies. At independence Ghana had a GDP on a par with South Korea, but decades of political instability, military coups and economic mismanagement brought the country to the brink of ruin. Ghana is now 83rd in the world rankings of GDP compared to South Korea at 13.

NONE of this is in the Tate exhibition, none of it, no politics, no economics, no contemporary history at all. Africa’s desperate history of secessions, civil wars, genocides, famines, economic mismanagement, rule by brutal Marxist murderers, by kleptocrats and homicidal dictators, NONE of that is here, none. It is all erased, made invisible, ignored, brushed under the carpet.

Instead what the wall labels repeat again and again and again are the only two tunes they know, the evils of colonialism (ended in the 1960s) and of the slave trade (ended 200 years ago). Simplistic binaries.

Why artists and curators simplify history and politics to make them more acceptable

In my review of Paul Danahar’s irritating book about the aftermath of the Arab Spring, I sketched out four reasons why even high-end (BBC, Channel 4) coverage of foreign affairs tends to be simplified and sanitised. These are:

1. Logistically easy It’s easier to get stories out of countries where journalists and film crews can operate freely, so countries with good infrastructure, like Israel or America, tend to be over-represented.

2. Familiar narratives Editors prefer sticking to super-familiar, easy narratives, my examples being the Arab-Israeli conflict and the (now defunct) struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Absolutely everyone was familiar with the outline of those stories which had taken on the simplicity of fairy tales. Pantomime narratives with pantomime goodies and baddies. Easy to understand, easy to write about, easy to feel moral indignation about, easy to go on marches about, all your emotions pre-packaged and ready to take away.

To give an example, bad stuff is happening in various parts of China (Xinjiang, Tibet) but my points 1 and 2 apply in that: 1) it’s difficult to get access to those places, and 2) the issues are complicated. But, for the sake of argument, say that a protest march in Hong Kong is broken up by riot police and – because it’s easy to access and easy to cover – it’s all over the front pages for days. Easy access. Easy issues. Somewhere we know about. Easy to relate to.

3. Britain-related Some places matter more to Brits than others because they used to be colonies or places where Brits lived and feel a residual attachment to, thus India, Hong Kong, Egypt, Kenya – or which we feel some kind of special responsibility for (the Middle East, all those lines on the map, the Balfour Declaration yadda yadda yadda). The result is that these countries are over-represented in British foreign news at the expense of everywhere else.

4. Student causes Lastly, there’s what you could call student politics. Some of these places are associated with big, simple-minded political causes. All good progressive people marched against apartheid in the 1980s. All good progressive people are outraged by Israel’s bombing of Gaza today. All good progressive people agree that China is not keeping to its bargain of letting Hong Kong remain a democracy. Etc.

In the same kind of way all good progressive people are shocked and disgusted by anything to do with the European empires. And all good progressive people are shocked etc by the slave trade.

These are hot button topics, guaranteed to win over the audience, please the crowd, which can’t fail to unite artists, curators and visitors in a cosy feeling of moral righteousness, moral superiority, grievance from the artists and grovelling apology by white gallery goers.

Slavery and the evils of empire are the new consensus topics – everyone agrees that they were utterly evil and that they explain everything about modern Africa.

All the artists chosen for this exhibition stick to the narrow line adopted by the curators that African history ceased some time in the 1960s, at the moment of independence, that nothing whatsoever has happened since then, that all Africans are still trying to cope with the trauma of imperialism or the trauma of the slave trade – and that absolutely nothing significant has happened since.

No military coups, civil wars, mad rulers, stupid socialist economics, thieving stealing looting leaders like Mobutu, psychopaths like Idi Amin, mass murderers like the Hutu regime in Rwanda, cannibals like the Emperor Bokassa, ruinous rebel leaders in Angola or Mozambique, warlord chaos in the Congo.

No African history beyond the 1960s is present in this exhibition because it doesn’t fit the simple-minded, pantomime-level narrative which many of the artists address and the curators almost obsessively promote – white slave traders / colonialists = evil, all black people = saintly victims.

I’m not saying the slave trade wasn’t bad or that colonialism wasn’t wretched, humiliating and shamelessly exploitative. Of course they were. And forms of neo-colonialism are obviously still alive and constraining African nations in all kinds of ways today. But that’s just the starting position: that’s the obvious stuff you need to process before moving on to a more sophisticated understanding of the situation.

You’re not going to begin to understand the plight of modern African countries unless you move on from the 1960s and engage with the 60 years of history since then. And then, once you’ve processed the 60 years since independence, it requires a further effort to engage with the host of military, economic and security issues which plague Africa today, in 2023.

Africa today

And what about the political and economic and social issues which face Africa today? Are these addressed in this exhibition? Is there any mention of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism across North Africa, of the havoc being wrought by al Qaeda, or Boko Haram, or al Shabaab? No. Nothing.

Sub-Saharan Africa is ‘new epicenter’ of extremism, says UN

Is there any mention of China’s involvement in Africa over the last 20 years, buying up raw materials and rare metals and food in exchange for infrastructure projects? Mention of China’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiatives all across Africa? Nothing.

China in Africa (Economist special)

Any mention of Russia’s growing involvement in North Africa, specifically through the Russian mercenary outfit, the Wagner Group? Nothing.

What Is Russia’s Wagner Group Doing in Africa? (Council for Foreign Relations)

Mention of the US’s surprisingly extensive investment in army, navy and air force bases across the region in efforts to combat Islamic terrorists? Nothing.

US bases in Africa

Lots of complicated geopolitical, military, strategic and economic manoeuvring is going on all across Africa, right now, as we speak, and none of it is discussed, described or even mentioned in this immensely backward-looking exhibition.

Conclusion

So I really liked lots of the art on display, a lot of these photos are stunning and breath-taking, world class, outstanding, and it is such a relief to get away from America and the usual suspects of the art world. Congratulations to Tate for staging this exhibition so beautifully and bringing so many great photographers to our attention.

But as politics this show is a washout, a whitewash, a travesty, a systematic erasure of African history for the last 60 years in favour of a fairy-tale story about colonialism. It not only takes absolutely no account of Africa’s 60 years of troubled tragic post-colonial history but presents a complete blank when it comes to the complex, difficult, multi-sided political issues faced by Africa today. An artistic triumph but when it comes to any serious discussion of the political, economic and social challenges of contemporary Africa, this exhibition is a travesty, seriously misleading in its omissions, elisions and simplifications of a long inconveniently complex history.

Tate Modern reviews

Tate Modern reviews

Terence

Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto*

Terence’s texts

Publius Terentius Afer, generally known as Terence (185 to 160 BC), died at the very young age of 25, having written just 6 plays which, however, are preserved in numerous manuscripts. So, unlike Plautus (who wrote 120 plays of which only 20 survive) a) his oeuvre is very small and b) we have it all.

Not only that but some of the manuscripts contain unprecedented detail for ancient texts – a prologue by the author plus notes giving the date of the play’s composition and notes on its first production. (These notes were written in the mid second century AD by Gaius Sulpicius Apollinaris of Carthage.)

We also have a short life of Terence by the noted historian Suetonius, written about 100 AD i.e. about 250 years after Terence died, with some later additions; plus a set of comprehensive notes on the plays by a later grammarian (the Commentum Terenti of Aelius Donatus). In other words, as ancient authors go, we have an unprecedented wealth of information about Terence and his work.

Biography

Publius Terentius Afer is said to have been born in 185 BC (or 195, accounts vary). He was born either in Carthage or south Italy to a slave woman from Carthage. Romans had three names. Terence’s last name or cognomen, Afer, in Latin meant ‘from Africa’, a term which Romans applied very broadly to all the lands on the south shore of the Mediterranean, generally meaning modern Tunisia and Libya.

Terentius was a slave belonging to the senator Publius Terentius Lucanus, who brought him to Rome, gave him his forenames, a good education and his freedom. Whatever his mother or family may have called him, Terence entered Roman society bearing the first two names of his owner and a cognomen denoting his origin.

The circle of Scipio Aemilius

As a young adult Terence is said to have been a member of ‘the Scipionic circle’, a group of intellectuals who met under the patronage of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Aemilianus (185 to 129 BC), known as Scipio Aemilianus, the Roman general who supervised the final destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.

The existence of such a circle is attested solely by two works of Cicero written a hundred years later in the 50s BC, and is now questioned by some scholars. If it did exist, young Terence would have been mixing with leading Roman intellectuals and philhellenes of the day, including the noted historian of the Punic Wars, Polybius.

Cicero records the circulation of scurrilous rumours that Terence’s plays were far too good for an ex-slave to have written and so must have been written by others in Scipio circle, and we also know this from the remarkable prefaces to the plays which he himself appears to have written and which cite and refute this rumour. The modern scholarly view is that Terence did write all the plays attributed to him.

Terence compared with his predecessor, Plautus

Terence adapted Greek plays from the late phases of Attic comedy, also known as the New Comedy, written by Greek playwrights such as Menander and his contemporaries. This genre of adaptation had a name of its own, fabulae palliatae (‘adaptations of Hellenistic comedies played in Greek dress’).

In this Terence was much like his famous forebear, the comic playwright Plautus (254 to 184) but with importance differences. Plautus’s plays are characterised by:

extensive use of complex verse forms, often intended to be sung, a little like operetta (‘the high spots of his plays are often his musical cantica‘)
dancing to music
clever comic wordplay
fast-moving, often slapstick plots

Plautus’s plays are loosely comparable to modern pantomime, in their zany slapdash humour and frequent speeches directly to the audience. By contrast, Terence’s six plays:

use simple, conversational Latin rather than elaborate wordplay for its own sake
have more plausible plots i.e. the characters aren’t made to do improbable things just for the momentary lols
place more emphasis on consistency of character, less on zany slapstick moments

More sophisticated, more philhellenic

In her introduction to the Penguin paperback edition of Terence’s complete plays, the translator Betty Radice points out that the shift from Plautus to Terence was not just a generational one (if Terence was born in 185 that was more or less the same year that Plautus died). It was a cultural shift away from the broad farce which had its roots in Italian peasant life (lots of farms are referred to in Plautus) to a much more refined and intellectual and consciously philhellene culture shared by an urban, cultural elite.

Radice emphasises the sophistication and attention which Terence plays demand of their audience. They tread a line between, on the one hand, the lowbrow, rustic humour of Italian peasant life and, on the other, the deeply conservative, puritanical values based on a reverence for family tradition exemplified by a conservative spokesman like Cato the Censor.

Terence was equidistant from both, promoting the values of an aesthetic circle which valued the merits of the Greek originals but wanted them combined with a more sophisticated reading of character and more believable plots, all conveyed in a refined and purified Latin style.

The double plot and other characteristics

Radice says that Terence’s main contribution to drama was the double plot, and that this allowed him to pursue his chief interest, which was the impact of plot on character. By having a double plot he could experiment with the contrasting impact on differing characters of the same situation. On this reading, plot isn’t something cobbled together to create as many farcical situations and lols as possible, as per Plautus; but a device to explore different types of character through a new kind of clear, expressive Latin verse. Terence:

created a simpler, purer Latin style than anything written before
made his plays more ‘realistic’ by removing the discursive explanatory prologues of Plautus – instead you have to infer the backstory from the characters’ dialogue alone
dispensed with divine intervention, setting his plays entirely in the human world
moved away from caricaturing minor characters (think of all those grumpy cooks in Plautus)
gave more respect to the older generation who are no longer just fuddy-duddies standing in the way of young lovers
was more respectful of women – for example, The Mother in Law is almost entirely a woman’s play

Stage conventions

As with Plautus, Terence’s stage sets showed the front doors of two (occasionally three) buildings. It was the convention of the day that characters exiting left were heading to the countryside or the city harbour, while exiting right was to go to the town centre or forum.

The acting style was declamatory i.e. loud and formalised, as were gestures and movements. It’s probable that, as in Greek comedy, the actors wore masks to indicate typical characters. These included the character types Terence himself mentions in a throwaway remark in his prologue to Heauton Timorumenos:

the running slave
the angry old man
the greedy sponger
the shameless imposter
the rapacious slave trader

Although Terence didn’t use the sung aria which was one of Plautus’s most notable features, nonetheless his spoken dialogue was entirely in verse which was rhythmically recited to the music of a pipe player. (Because of the survival of the production notes we even know the names of the composers: for example, the pipe music for Andria was composed by one ‘Flaccus, slave of Claudius.’)

The occasional aria is thought to have been mimed by the actor and performed by a professional singer who stood to one side of the stage next to the pipe player. Possibly this was the same person as the cantor who ended every play by inviting the audience to applaud.

It’s hard to think of an approach to theatre more different from our modern style of microscopic realism, where exposure to countless movies and TV dramas has taught us to look for the slightest frown or smile or movement to convey meaning. These guys wore heavy masks, stood still and bellowed at the audience, or broke into song or dance.

Terence’s huge legacy

Terence has a claim to have created ‘problem’ comedy i.e. light-hearted plays which address fairly serious issues. He is routinely described as ‘a major influence on European drama’.

The purity of his Latin quite quickly made him a model for students learning the language, in the ancient world and beyond, which helps to explain the survival of all his texts through the long Middle Ages in numerous copies. Radice gives a long, detailed and fascinating summary of the afterlife of Terence’s plays, through Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages when they were valued enough to be extensively copied – the scholar Claudia Villa estimated that 650 manuscripts containing Terence’s work date from after AD 800.

Due to his clear and entertaining language, Terence’s works were heavily used by monasteries and convents during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Scribes often learned Latin through the meticulous copying of Terence’s texts. Priests and nuns often learned to speak Latin through re-enactment of Terence’s plays. (Wikipedia)

The dawn of the Renaissance in Italy saw the extensive revival, translation and new performances of his plays. The Renaissance humanist Erasmus included no fewer than 250 references to and quotes from Terence in his Adages, which were designed to prove that the best values of Antiquity were perfectly aligned with Christian morality. The German church reformer Martin Luther not only quoted Terence frequently but recommended his comedies for the instruction of children in school. Terence was translated by numerous eminent Renaissance authors, including Machiavelli.

* Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

This is Terence’s most famous quote, from the play Heauton Timorumenos. It means literally:

I am a human being; of that which is human, I think nothing estranged from me.

More smoothly as:

I am human, and think nothing human is alien to me.

I prefer the implications of the latter because it reinforces one of my core principles, which is a frank acceptance of human nature in all its gruesomeness. We are, after all, only animals which, through a quirk of evolution, happen to be able to ‘think’, sort of, sometimes.

Most history is horrific, most humans are disappointing, many are terrifying. We must make the best of life based on a realistic assessment of human history and behaviour. Denying these realities distorts our understanding of human nature, human history and human society, and undermines assessments of what realistic change and reform we can hope to effect.

Therefore I accept it, accept it all, all human behaviour, the killers and rapists, the paedophiles and génocidaires, the greedy billionaires and the drug addict muggers, alongside the sugar and spice and all things nice which the sentimental, naive and wilfully blind want human nature to consist of – and the huge territory between these extremes, where people are confused, uncertain, generally nice, sometimes stressed, angry or inexplicable and unpredictable. And that is what this quote means to me. It signifies a complete, Nietzschean acceptance of the gritty reality.

Radice, on the other hand, translates it as:

I am human myself, so I think every human affair is my concern.

Which may be a true translation but whose last few words seems to me to drastically expand the thought, making it far more pro-active and empathetic than my preferred version. Radice’s translation implies that all human affairs are my concern i.e. that I ought to be actively involved in them. Turns it from the detached and rather analytical acceptance of my version into a motto for Amnesty International.

I prefer the second translation, which implies that I should take note of and take account of all human affairs – but not be so foolish as to get caught up in them.

Credit

All page references are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition of Terence: The Comedies.

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Terence

Terence’s texts

Biography

The circle of Scipio Aemilius

Terence compared with his predecessor, Plautus

More sophisticated, more philhellenic

The double plot and other characteristics

Stage conventions

Terence’s huge legacy

* Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto

Credit

Roman reviews

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