Dispatches from two failed States, Zimbabwe & Nigeria

Two of Africa's contemporary writers, Petina Gappah and Chimamanda N. Adichie, have portraits of their native countries, Zimbabwe and Nigeria. Great writing, a study in contrast in styles and personalities. I have the feeling that these two writers, to the degree that they remain faithful to their temperaments, philosophies and creative outputs, will surely shape African writing in ways Achebe and Soyinka did.

Petina Gappah: "Zimbabwe:
"If Zimbabwe were human, the country would need more years of therapy than its 30 years of independence. According to Foreign Policy, in 2010, Zimbabwe was fourth on the “Failed State Index.” In 2006, it was declared to be the unhappiest place on earth—ahead of Zimbabwe on the “Happiness Index” were countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and North Korea. In 2008, it had inflation rates not seen since the Weimar Republic: prices of goods changed as customers walked to the tills. By any measure, Zimbabweans should just have given up, switched off what little lights remained burning, and hightailed it to the nearest border.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:"Why Are You Here?"
I came at the wrong time. It was mid-March 2011, a few weeks before general elections, and every surface in Lagos—compound walls, gates, even buses—was covered with political posters. “You came at injury time,” the senior teacher at the government junior high school told me. She was small and well-groomed, her blouse awash in ruffles. She looked me over suspiciously. “Why are you here?”

SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: Memoirs of an Outsider

Having spent copious time with my mother, in my village, and having survived the chaos of Nigerian life (oil subsidy removal and all other idiocies), I'm happy be back to my workplace in the West. I loved being with my people; I didn't like the pain and misery they still go through. Well, I'm happy to report on some of the intellectual things going on in the African world. Here is a review of Zakes Mda's memoir, "SOMETIMES THERE IS A VOID: Memoirs of an Outsider," by Rob Nixon:

A sample:
"The lesson he learns has ramifications that carry well beyond his personal story: how easy it is for a successful, mid-career artist to lapse into the role of professional opinion maker and cosmopolitan partygoer. In the end, Mda resists the fatal temptations of the limelight. Tiring of the deadening dishonesties that pollute official discourse among A.N.C. apparatchiks, he realizes that creativity and probity are less in demand than sycophancy. And so he trades hectic Johannesburg for American academia, where he can better sustain the anonymity and inventive autonomy that feed his talent."
ENJOY

Wainaina Has No Right To Speak For All Africans

Betty Caplan asks an interesting question that seems to touch the core of Binyavanga Wainaina's ideology. "What, I want to ask, gives Wainana permission to speak on behalf of all Africans? Where does the royal “we” come from?"

To establish her argument she quotes Wainaina:

"With that wonderful Kenyan burr and distinctive accentuation, he rhetorically pronounced: “We are not interested in Oxfam, we are not interested in Tony Blair, we are not interested in what Oxfam is doing for America (Africa?), we are not interested in what aid donors are doing....we never have been. We don’t talk about it, we don’t discuss it.”

Like authors all around the world, African writers were interested in the lives of people around them. “If you ask me what are the greatest issues in Africa I would say that it is that people love, people, fuck, people kiss, people speak.”

Is Betty Caplan correct in her analysis? Is her analysis fundamentally flawed? Is she being patronizing because of her skin color? I am happy that some discussions about the African intellectual state of affairs are taking place.

ENJOY

The Trials of Chris Abani and the Power of Empty Words

The gadfly is at it again.

"When the history of Africa’s troubled journey is accurately chronicled, the world will come to realize the horror of the self-serving perfidy of Africa’s intellectual leaders. We are the new self-serving colonialists perpetuating black-on-black crime on our own people."

An educative read, a good piece about a disturbing development.
ENJOY

Kenyan author attacks insularity of British fiction

"Binyavanga Wainaina says authors fail to tell 'universal' stories, leaving their books 'indigestible' for modern Africans." The Guardian.

I understand that Wainaina's words need some contextualization in order to understand where he's coming from. At any rate, it does appear that he makes the same mistake he accuses the West of: generalization, slippery slope, and perhaps, some degree of ideological antithetical positioning. When he claims that Africans don't understand British writing, what on earth, does he mean by African? Who, exactly, does not understand British writing? Wainaina? Kenyans? When has Wainaina become representative of Kenyans, and when have Kenyans become the sum of Africans? Has Wainaina read Ian McEwan?Julian Barnes? Zadie Smith? Monica Ali? And what, on earth, does he mean by "universal?"
As one who owes his life to good luck and the empathic gestures from Europeans during the Biafran war, I find it somewhat disturbing that Wainaina, who was born circa a decade after the Biafran war, and far removed from the scenes of Biafran horrors, would make a sweeping condemnation of rescue/aid agencies such as Oxfam. In my case, in 1968/69, it was the Irish aid agency "Concern" that saved me and many other famishing, kwashiorkor Biafran kids. Without Concern, and perhaps, Oxfam, I would have perhaps succumbed to the famine that was orchestrated by fellow Nigerians/Africans. Why would any person in his right mind ever condemn Bob Geldof for having responded to the human tragedy that took place in Ethiopia and Somalia? I am sincerely baffled. I get the impression that Wainaina's need to save the good image of Africa has blunted his sensibility to the pains of the African bodies. I only hope that this is a special case of an ideological pitfall, which time and intellectual maturation would take care of. But this, of course, does not imply my support of the contemporary African beggarly mindset. Quite the opposite. I have been saved so that I can help save others.

Listen to Binyavanga's interview on the books podcast