Here the writer and his/her work were part of the African revolution. Both were its products even as the writer and the literature tried to understand, reflect and interpret the revolution. The promptings of his/her imagination sprang from the fountain of the African anti-imperialist anti-colonial movement of the 1940s and 1950s. From every tongue came the same tune: Tell Freedom.

Contradictions of Color and Class

But very often the writer who sang Tell Freedom in tune and time with the deepest aspirations of his/her society did not always understand the true dimensions of those aspirations, or rather, he/she did not always adequately evaluate the real enemy of these aspirations. Imperialism was far too easily seen in terms of the skin pigmentation of the colonizer. It is not surprising of course that such an equation should have been made since racism and the tight caste system in colonialism had ensured that the social rewards and punishments were carefully structured on the mystique of color.

Labor was not just labor but black labor; capital was not just capital but white owned capital. Exploitation and its necessary consequence, oppression, were black. The vocabulary by which the conflict between colonial labor and imperialist capital was perceived and ideologically fought out consisted of white and black images sometimes freely interchangeable with the terms European and African.

The sentence or the phrase was ‘…when the white man came to Africa…’  and not ‘…when the imperialist or the colonialist came to Africa…’; or ‘…one day these whites will go…’ and not ‘…one day imperialism or these imperialists will go…’! Except in a few cases, what was being celebrated in the writing was the departure of the white man with the implied hope that the incoming black man by virtue of his blackness would right the wrongs and heal the wounds of centuries of slavery and colonialism.

As a result of this reductionism to the polarities of color and race, the struggle of African people against European colonialism was seen in terms of a conflict of values between the African and the European ways of perceiving and reacting to reality. But which African values? Which white values? The values of the European proletariat and of the African proletariat? Of the European imperialist bourgeoisie and of the collaborationist African petit bourgeoisie? The values of the African peasant and those of a European peasant?

An undifferentiated uniformity of European or white values was posited against an equally undifferentiated uniformity of African or black values. In short, the writer and the literature he/she produced did not often take and hence treat imperialism as an integrated economic, political and cultural system whose negation had also to be an integrated economic, political cultural system of its opposite: national independence, democracy and socialism. And so, the writer, armed with an inadequate grasp of the extent, the nature and the power of the enemy could only be shocked by the broken promises as his/her society entered the second decade.

The beginnings of the 1960s saw an acceleration of the independence movements. Tanzania, Uganda, Zaire, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, Congo (Brazzaville), Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali – country after country won the right to fly a national flag and to sing a national anthem. At the end of the 1960s only a few smudges on the map represented old colonies. The Organization of African States (OAU) was the symbol of the new age.

But if the 1960s was the decade of African independence, it was also the decade when old style imperialism tried to halt the momentum of the anti-colonial struggle and the successes of the 1950s; old style imperialism clung tenaciously to Angola, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique. In Zimbabwe, Ian Smith and his Rhodesian Front – with the active covert and overt encouragement from the big imperialist bourgeoisie – tried to create a second South Africa by means of American sounding UDI [Universal Declaration of Independence].          

Internationally, that is outside Africa, this last stand of old-style imperialism was represented by the U.S. in South Vietnam. But U.S. domination of South Vietnam also represented new style imperialism – that is U.S.-led imperialism ruling through puppet regimes. Thus, in Vietnam lay a clue as to what was happening to the Africa of the 1960s, happening, that is, to its independence from classical colonialism.

New Imperialist Pressures

To the majority of African people in the new states, independence did not bring about fundamental changes. It was independence with the ruler holding a begging bowl, and the ruled holding a shrinking belly. It was independence with a question mark. The age of independence had produced a new class and a new leadership that often was not very different from the old one. Black skins, white masks? White skins, black masks? Black skins concealing colonial settler hearts?

It was Frantz Fanon in his book Les Damnés de la Terre first published in French in 1961 and later, 1965, in English under the title The Wretched of the Earth, who prophetically summed up the new age. The class that took over power after independence was an underdeveloped middle class which was not interested in putting the national economy on a new footing, but in becoming an intermediary between Western interests and the people, a handsomely paid business agent of the Western bourgeoisie:

“Before independence, the leader generally embodies the aspirations of the people for independence, political liberty and national dignity. But as soon as independence is declared, far from embodying in concrete form the needs of the people in what touches bread, land and the restoration of the country to the sacred hands of the people, the leader will reveal his inner purpose: to become the general president of that company of profiteers impatient for their returns which constitutes the national bourgeoisie?”

I have always argued that literature written by Africans, and particularly the literature of this period, cannot really be understood without a proper and thorough reading of the chapter, “Pitfalls of National Consciousness” in Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The literature of this period was an imaginative footnote to Fanon.

The new regimes in the independent states increasingly came under pressure from external and internal sources. The external pressure emanated from the West which wanted these states to maintain their independence and nonalignment firmly on the side of Western economic and political interests. Where a regime showed a consistent desire to break away from the Western orbit, destabilization through economic sabotage and political intrigue was set in motion. The U.S. role in bringing down Patrice Lumumba and installing the Mobutu military regime in Zaire at the very beginnings of the decade was a sign of things to come.

The internal pressure came from the people who soon saw that independence had brought no alleviation to their poverty and certainly no end to political repression. People saw in most of the new regimes dependence on foreigners, grand mismanagement and well-maintained police boots. To quote Fanon:

“scandals are numerous, ministers grow rich, their wives doll themselves up, the members of parliament feather their nests and there is not a soul down to the simple policeman or the customs officer who does not join in the great procession of corruption”

Some military intervened either at the promptings of the West or in response to what they genuinely saw and felt as the moral decay. But they too did not know what else to do with the state except to run the status quo with the gun held at the ready – not against imperialism – but against the very people the army had ostensibly stepped in to save.

Thus the 1960’s, the age of independence, became the era of coups d’etat whether Western-backed or in patriotic response to internal pressures. Zaire in 1960 and 1965; Nigeria and Ghana in 1966; Sierra Leone, Sudan, Mali, Uganda: all these and more fell to the army and by 1970 virtually every independent state had experienced a measure of military coups, attempted coups or threats of coups.

The Writer’s Revenge

The result was often intraclass fratricide as in the case of Zaire and Nigeria but one that dragged the masses into meaningless deaths, starvation and stagnation. The era of coups d’etat conjured up two hideous monstrosities: Bokassa and Idi Amin, two initial darlings of the West who were to make a total mockery of the notion of independence. But hideous as they were, they were only symbols of all the broken promises of independence

What was wrong with Africa? What had gone wrong? The mood of disillusionment engulfed the writer and the literature of the period. It was Chinua Achebe in A Man of the People who correctly reflected the conditions that bred coups and rumors of coups. The fictional narrator captures the deliberate murder of democracy by the new leadership in the image of a house:

“We had all been in the rain together until yesterday. Then a handful of us – the smart and the lucky and hardly the best – had scrambled for the one shelter our former ruler left, and had taken it over and barricaded themselves in. And from within they sought to persuade the rest through numerous loudspeakers, that the first phase of the struggle had been won and that the next phase – the extension of our house – was even more important and called for new and original tactics; it required that all argument should cease and the whole people speak with one voice and that any more dissent and argument outside the door of the shelter would subvert and bring down the whole house.”

A Man of the People coming out at about the same time as the first Nigerian military coup had shown the case of a writer as a prophet. But other writings – particularly Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino – were equally incisive in their horror at the moral decay in the new states.

The writer responded to the decay by appealing to the conscience of the new class. If only they would listen! If only they would see the error of their ways! He/she pleaded, lamented, threatened, painted the picture of the disaster ahead, talked of a fire next time. He/she tried the corrective antidote of contemptuous laughter, ridicule, direct abuse with images of shit and urine, every filth imaginable.

The writer often fell on the kind of revenge Marx once saw the progressive elements among the feudal aristocracy taking against the new bourgeoisie that was becoming the dominant class in 19th century Europe. Then, the aristocracy “took their revenge by singing lampoons on their new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.”

“In this way arose feudal socialism; half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core; but always ludicrous in its effect, through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history.”

Thus, the writer in this period was still limited by his/her inadequate grasp of the full dimension of what was really happening in the 1960s: the international and national realignment of class forces and class alliances. What the writer often reacted to was the visible lack of moral fiber of the new leadership and not necessarily the structural basis of that lack of a national moral fiber.

“The writer often reacted to the lack of moral fiber of the new leadership and not the structural basis…”

Sometimes the writer blamed the people – the recipients of crimes – as well as the perpetrators of the crimes against the people. At times the moral horror was construed in terms perilously close to blaming it all on the biological character of the people. Thus, although the literature produced was incisive in its observation, it was nevertheless characterized by a sense of despair. The writer in this period often retreated into individualism, cynicism or into empty moral appeals for a change of heart.

The neocolonial era

It was the third period, the 1970s, that was to reveal what really had been happening in the 1960s: the transition of imperialism from the colonial to the neocolonial stage. On the international level, the U.S.-engineered overthrow of the Allende regime in Chile was a victory for neocolonialism. The decade saw the clear ascendancy of U.S.-dominated transnational financial and industrial monopolies in most of Asia, Africa and Latin America.

This ascendancy was to be symbolized by the dominance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in the determination of the economies and hence the politics and cultures of the affected countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The era saw the U.S. surround Africa with military bases or with some kind of direct U.S. military presence all the way from Morocco via Diego Garcia to Kenya and Egypt

The aims of the Rapid Deployment Forces formed in the same decade were unashamedly slated as interventionist in third world affairs, i.e. in affairs of the neocolonies. Indeed, the decade saw an increasing readiness of former colonial powers to militarily enter Africa without even a trace of shame. The increasingly open, naked financial, industrial, (see Free Trade Zones), military and political interference of Western interests in the affairs of African countries with the active cooperation of the ruling regimes in the same countries, showed quite clearly that the so-called independence had only opened each of the African countries to wider imperialist interests. Dependence abroad; repression at home became the national norm.

But if the 1970s revealed more clearly the neocolonial character of many of the African countries, the 1970s also saw very important and eye-opening gains by the anti-imperialist struggles. Internationally, the single most important event was the defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam. But there were other shattering blows against neocolonialism, Nicaragua and Iran for example.

In Africa the 1970s saw a victorious resurgence of anti-imperialism. The armed struggles in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau and Zimbabwe had clearly gained from the errors of the earlier anti- colonial movements in the 1950s. They could see the enemy much more clearly and they could clearly analyze their struggles in terms that were beyond just the question of color and race.

Their enemy was imperialism and the classes that allied with imperialism. The new awakening to the realities of imperialism was reflected in some very important theoretical and political breakthroughs in the works of Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Ben Magubane and in many papers emanating from university centers in many parts of the continent.