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Imperialist: Country

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Phan Xuân Yến Nhi
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27 views3 pages

Imperialist: Country

Uploaded by

Phan Xuân Yến Nhi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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433

These two volumes point out the lessons of intervention in Chile and
Indonesia to the struggle within the imperialist metropole. America is not
another country.

University of Manchester LOUIS KUSHNICK

References
1. Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York and London, 1969), pp.98-9.
2. Cheryl Payer, ’The IMF and the World Bank’, in Steve Weissman (ed.), The
Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid (San Francisco, 1974), p. 64).
3. See also Latin America and Empire Report (October 1973 and July-August 1974).
4. Quoted in William Hinton, Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at
Tsinghua University (New York and London, 1972), p. 21. See also David
Ransom, ’Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia’, in Weissman, op.cit.,
pp. 93-117. For a discussion of the Chilean economists’ planning for the junta,
see Latin America and Empire Report (October 1974).

Second Class Citizen

By BUCHI EMECHETA (London, Allison and Busby, 1974). 175pp. £2.50


Of the scores of books about race and black communities in Britain that have
appeared during the 1960s and early 1970s, the great majority are written by
white academics ultimately concerned with the relationship between white
society and black ’immigrants’. Few accounts have emerged from those on the
receiving end of British racism or liberalism of their own black experience. On
the specific situation of black women there is almost nothing. Second Class
C~tizen, a new novel by the Ibo woman writer Buchi Emecheta, is therefore
something of a revelation.
The book starts with the Nigerian childhood of Adah Obi, who, armed
with brains and a consuming dream of travelling to England to study, battles
her way through the general indifference towards someone unlucky enough
to have been born a girl. Finally she arrives in the promised land, to continue
her struggle, this time with racism and disillusionment, contending with the
endless problems of housing and money, repeated pregnancies, a callous and
selfish husband, against a background of weariness and isolation which drives
her at times to the borders of insanity.
Through the experience of Adah and her husband Francis, Emecheta enters
the precarious, anxious world of the Nigerian student, a private world about
which little is known outside. As Adah discovers, all blacks are the same to
English eyes; people do not realize that although they must find work as the
money runs out, many Nigerians come here only to study; that although it
may take years longer than imagined, their sole aim is to gain the qualifica-
tions for which they came, and to return home as soon as possible.
The inherent contradictions in this situation clearly emerge as the years
drag by for Adah and Francis, with an ever-widening gulf between expecta-
tions and reality. The myth of England, built up by middle-class missionaries
and administrators, which had featured so prominently in their early lives, is

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434

rudely shattered by the racism they encounter and the social conditions they
find in London. The journey to England is intended to effect the final
transition into the Nigerian bourgeoisie, set apart from the masses of peasants
and workers by income, life-style and access to the ruling class (unobtainable
to all but a well-educated few). Yet in London, these would-be elite find
themselves taking the same manual jobs and dingy cramped rooms as the
black working-class. Solidarity with others in the same position is essential
for survival and for maintaining a self-identity in a hostile environment; but
they find their community is scattered over London, torn by Yoruba/Ibo
conflict, and by the jealousies and gossip engendered by the individualistic
competition for success - reinforcing loneliness and isolation.
For a woman, second-class citizen on the grounds of sex as well as race,
the contradictions are even greater. Adah is caught between her expected role
as an Ibo wife, and her own aspirations. She discovers the hollowness of the

’emancipation’ of the educated woman. Francis, determined to crush her into


subordination, appeals to ’tradition’. Yet this aim of complete domination
comes as much from missionary propaganda on the submission of women as

indigenous reality. Despite her ultimate lack of control over her own life,
Adah’s mother had her own status in her extended family; the elders would
safeguard the obligations of her husband towards her; she had her own small
income from trade, and respect and support in a world of feminine solidarity.
For Adah, a combination of the isolation of London and the narrow confines
of her Christian monogamous marriage, throw her into total social dependence
on her husband, whom she dutifully supports financially, while getting little
in return. Her children, while confirming the ideal of a successful Ibo marriage,
add intolerable pressure to her own domestic life.
Although Emecheta vividly portrays Adah’s suffering, some of the most
fundamental contradictions in her situation are left unexposed. While she had
deplored the imposition of western materialistic values on her Ibo society, she
herself is dedicated to achieving a career and a comfortable life through
accepting the standards of the same capitalism which was destroying her own
culture. She fantasizes about sending her children to English public schools
So alienated is she from her own background that she sees her husband as
coming from &dquo;another culture&dquo;. Her personal hatred of Francis also prevents
her from realizing the roots of his own dilemma. She has flashes of insight
into his frustration, into his internalized sense of inferiority, into his failure
both as a student and as a husband, into his attempt to cling onto some self-
esteem through sectarian religion and assertion of authority over her. But she
does not go back to question the whole basis of his endeavour, the acquisition
of educational qualifications which have assumed such overwhelming
significance for Nigerian students. With the underdevelopment of indigenous
enterprise through colonial domination of the economy, qualifications are
the only way into a bureaucratic bourgeoisie.
But it is possible that much of this novel is autobiographical; Buchi
Emecheta is a sociologist, living in London with her five children. The bitter-
ness, the hurt, and crass sexism that so many women in Adah’s position must

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435

have experienced cannot be expressed through sociological rationalizations.


Thank goodness.

London HERMIONE HARRIS

Looking on Darkness

By ANDRE P. BRINK (London, W.H. Allen, 1974). 399pp. £3.95


In 1960 or so a group of Afrikaans writers broke with the conservative
literature which, true to the Calvinist tradition, eschews questions of sex and
religion and pretty much accepts the assumptions of the prevailing social
order in South Africa. This group is called the Sestigers - Men of the Sixties -
of whom Andre Brink, author of the novel under review, became the leading
spokesman.
Even so, the break with the past was not clean. In 1968 a schism occurred
in the group. One section, though prepared to experiment with subjects
hitherto taboo, refused to face up to the explosive social and political issues
of the day. It remained ’apolitical’. The other, under Brink, insisted on
exposing the entire fabric of society, challenging the tyranny of the state,
the tyranny of colour. Looking on Darkness is a product of this school.
Called Kennis van die Aand (Knowledge of the Night) when it first appeared
in Afrikaans, it has been brilliantly translated into English by the author
himself. The book enjoys the distinction of having been banned in South
Africa immediately after its publication there. The translation, the first of its
kind, has, however, ensured its access to the world at large. It is, therefore,
the first Afrikaans novel to achieve international significance. Deservedly so.
A large stratum of white society was scandalized, not merely by the
book’s descriptive accounts of sexual love - rather mild by western standards
-

but by its central theme: the love affair between a Coloured intellectual
and a European girl, all the more ’immoral’ because illegal in South Africa.
’The honourable name of art suits this work in only one context - it is the
most beautiful example of septic art. If this is art, then a brothel is a Sunday
school’ - thus said the Moderator of that brothel of the spirit, the General
Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church.
Tle main purpose of Andre Brink is to use the love affair to explore the
cancerous condition of South African society, to expose the ubiquitous
state with its complete control over the minutiae of people’s lives, to indict
an institutionalized racism which causes tragedies of a very personal kind.

Hardly anything is known outside South Africa of this radical trend in


Afrikaans literature. The intellectual challenge which Andre Brink’s school
poses to the regime is more potent, more dangerous, than that of South
African English liberal writers who began to publish protest literature several
decades ago. For one thing, the Afrikaner writers exhibit a greater commit-
ment to the struggle for the abolition of apartheid. For another, their break
with racism is irrevocable; that of the English-speaking liberals is, generally

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