Teleology and Secular Time in Armah and Ngũgĩ: Augustine, Manicheanism, and the African Novel

Abstract

Modern secularity is sometimes taken to require an understanding of time as shapeless and open-ended. In contrast, Armah's novel Two Thousand Seasons and Ngũgĩ's novel Matigari deploy a temporality that steers the reader's attention to a certain deliverance in the future. Rather than taking this teleology as the rejection of secularity, I propose a notion of secularity derived from the North African Aurelius Augustine's fourth-century The City of God. Like these two novels, Augustine's work was disparaged as "manichean" because it seems to deny human freedom by dividing up individuals, institutions, and eras too starkly. However, Augustine's dualism complements a notion of the saeculum—the current age—as a time of intractable mixedness. In embracing key aspects of manicheanism without its morally exclusivist and politically separatist vision of the present, Augustine anticipates and illuminates the interventions by Armah and Ngũgĩ into the problem of postcolonial time.