Zones of Occult Instability: The Birth of the Novel in Africa

Abstract

What distinguishes the novel, writes Mikhail Bakhtin, is that “the forces that define it as a genre are at work before our very eyes: the birth and development of the novel as a genre takes place in the full light of the historical day” (“Epic” 3). In this essay, I consider some of the historical forces at work in the birth of the African novel, an event that occurred in the early years of the twentieth century at a French missionary press in southern Africa, in what is now Lesotho. To make such a granular claim is to take seriously Bakhtin's argument that the emergence of the novel is empirically observable, “interwoven” with the broader historical “tendencies of a new world still in the making” (7). But this claim also entails a shift of focus and orientation beyond Bakhtin's concern with Europe—a “stretching” of his argument, to adapt Frantz Fanon's insight in The Wretched of the Earth, that “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem” (40).Fanon would likely object, for example, to Bakhtin's account of the historical rupture that catalyzed the birth of the novel: Europe's emergence from provincial isolation “into international and interlingual contacts and relationships. A multitude of different languages, cultures, and times became available to Europe, and this became a decisive factor in its life and thought” (11). Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth refuses such euphemizing syntactic passivity, on behalf of the ravaged worlds that “became available to Europe” over centuries of imperial expansion and pillage. Yet, as I argue below, there is a powerful affinity between Bakhtin's account of the novel and Fanon's account of the nation, so that Bakhtin, like Fanon, might be understood as a theorist of decolonization.1My account of the birth of the African novel centers around Thomas Mofolo, a Mosotho and third-generation Christian who was educated in the 1890s at schools run by the Paris Evangelical Missionary Society (PEMS) in Basutoland, a British Crown Colony in southern Africa. European Christian missionaries were a crucial vector of literacy in nineteenth-century Africa: they brought printing presses and agricultural implements, set up mission stations, and used early converts as native informants to help translate and disseminate the Bible and other religious texts in African languages, as part of an ambitious project to remake every aspect of African life. Christian mission presses played a crucial, if largely inadvertent, role in African literary history, and Thomas Mofolo is a crucial figure in the transition from mission-sponsored literacy to the emergence of a modern Black African literary tradition. Between 1905 and 1910, Mofolo wrote at least four novels in Sesotho, two of which were published almost immediately by the PEMS mission press at Morija. Another novel was unpublished and since lost, but the fourth, Chaka, became, after its belated publication in 1925, “perhaps the first major [modern] African contribution to world literature,” the “first novel written in an African language which was to have an international circulation” (Gérard, Four 116 and “Rereading” 1).2 In addition to English, French, German, Italian, and Afrikaans translations, at least 40,000 copies of the Sesotho original were printed in nine editions by 1962, making Chaka “undoubtedly the most popular best seller in the vernaculars of southern Africa” (Gérard, Four 130). The significance of Chaka endures a century later: it appears in an unranked list of the top twelve of “Africa's 100 Best Books of the Twentieth Century,” compiled in 2002.Mofolo not only wrote the first African world novel; he also authored “the first novel ever to be written by a black African anywhere in Africa” (Couzens 285). His first novel, Moeti oa Bochabela (Traveler to the East), was published in book form in September 1907, after having been serialized in the Morija mission newspaper Leselinyana la Lesotho (The Little Light of Lesotho) over the course of that year. “A new branch of African literature was born,” literary historian Tim Couzens remarks (285). In Livre d'Or de la Mission du Lessouto (1912), PEMS missionaries Hermann Dieterlen and Frédéric Kohler narrate Mofolo's achievement as almost a fairy-tale culmination of decades of mission work: “Then one fine day, he began to create a work of the imagination, absolutely original . . . ” (507–8).In keeping with Bakhtin's account of the novel as “the only genre born of this new world and in total affinity with it” (7), this essay situates what has been described as the “Golden Age” of Sesotho literary production (Peter Sulzer qtd. in Jahn 102) in relation to broader historical currents, in order to consider what “languages, cultures, and times became available” to would-be writers in southern Africa in the wake of multiple waves and modes of conquest and dispossession. I understand Mofolo's three extant novels to be shaped equally by the horrors of the precolonial displacement and decimation of the Basotho people in the early nineteenth century, by the optimism and confidence of a mission-educated intelligentsia at the turn of the twentieth century, and by the looming threat of subjugation through incorporation into the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910 out of the British Cape and Natal colonies and the two Afrikaner republics in the aftermath of the South African War. Bakhtin's meditation on how the past can be mobilized to engage the present and future provides the backdrop for my consideration of Mofolo's role in the invention of the African novel, even as the particularities of his historical predicament suggest that the certainties about “the colonial problem” that we take from Fanon must themselves be stretched. Thinking capaciously about what kind of thing the novel in Africa might be, I also identify some other moments when it can be seen to emerge.It is from Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth that I borrow my title, specifically the luminous passage in “On National Culture” about the predicament of the native intellectual in the struggle for anticolonial national liberation: It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called into question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to the zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light. (227)This “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” is as much a when as a where. Fanon sketches something like a chronotope of national culture, which can only be forged with the people in their present struggle for national liberation, rather than by seeking to return to some “authentic” precolonial past. As Robert J. C. Young remarks, the lyrical phrase “occult instability” (déséquilibre occulte) has an orthopedic connotation of subluxation, as in a dislocated joint. For Fanon, colonialism enacted a “hidden dislocation,” so that the people have long dwelt in a zone of occult instability, one inaugurated by European colonialism. The struggle for decolonization, whose fluctuating movement the people are “just giving a shape to,” is a new phase of instability; the form and content of culture to be produced will be “shape[d]” by the nation forged in that struggle.In temporal terms, Fanon valorizes a future-directed yet indeterminate present in which the struggle for national liberation (and thus for national culture) unfolds. Fanon's “zone of occult instability where the people dwell” is resonant with Bakhtin's account of the temporal disposition of the novel, which inhabits “the zone of maximal contact with the present (with contemporary reality) in all its openendedness” (“Epic” 11). The affinity between Fanon's nation and Bakhtin's novel is not merely in the lexical echo (on the translated middle ground of English) of this “zone” of an open-ended present—the controlling motif of Bakhtin's essay, and for Bakhtin a distinguishing feature of the novel, at the heart of its logic and definition. There is also a formal and substantive affinity in the dialectical structure of these arguments about the matrical present.Fanon describes a three-phase process in which the colonized intellectual first embraces European culture, then seeks to recover an “authentic” but ultimately inaccessible precolonial past, and finally joins the struggle for national liberation in the present, that “zone of occult instability where the people dwell.” Bakhtin, for his part, first draws an indelible line between epic and novel by defining the epic past as “walled off absolutely from all subsequent times” (15); “One cannot glimpse it, grope for it, touch it, one cannot look at it from just any point of view. . . . It is given solely as tradition” (16). (It is this monumental status of precolonial cultural tradition that Fanon disavows; his second-phase native intellectual “wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments” by immersing himself in the past [223–24].) But, having drawn this indelible line between finished past and unfinished present, Bakhtin turns to meditate on how the novel makes use of the past, even the epic past. Thus can he assert that “contemporary reality and its concerns become the starting point and center of an artistic ideological thinking and evaluating of the past. . . . only in the novel have we the possibility of an authentically objective portrayal of the past as the past” (29). One aspect of the novel's polyphony, then, is being shot through with “an authentic other language from another time” (30).In “On National Culture,” Fanon mentions the novel only once, and in passing, as he enumerates the developments in the “crystallization of national consciousness” that generates a national literature: these developments include shifts from poetry to prose, from protest to precision, and from addressing the colonizer to “addressing his own people” (239–40). Nonetheless, these affinities between Bakhtin and Fanon offer new insight about the relationship between novel and nation writ large in the context of colonialism. Novels (and newspapers) have long been on the radar of postcolonial critics as sites of national imagining, thanks to seminal work by Benedict Anderson and Timothy Brennan, the latter of whom wrote suggestively in 1987 about a “national longing for form”: “It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles” (49). Brennan observes the irony that neither Bakhtin nor Lukács had much to say about the historicity of the novel form after the eighteenth century (54)—an insight that I want to push further by asking, to what extent can we understand Bakhtin as a theorist of decolonization, and Fanon as a theorist of the novel? By positing novels as “zones of occult instability,” I'm interested in the narrative implications of Fanon's ideas about colonialism as destabilizing and national liberation as not-yet determinate, as well as his dynamic homologies among people, nation, and culture. Bakhtin's tacit rejoinder to Lukács in “Epic and Novel” prompts the question of whether the novel (as opposed to the epic) can in fact be a “zone . . . where the people dwell” (emphasis added)—a question that Mofolo answers in the affirmative for the African novel, since “the people” (as well as “the women”) appear as aggregate, chorus-like characters in all of his works.Yet a certain generic instability also surrounds Mofolo's oeuvre, most urgently in Chaka, a fictionalized account of the early nineteenth-century rise and fall of the Zulu king Shaka;3 there we see Mofolo uncertainly poised at the threshold between epic and novel, even as he draws on myriad other oral and written forms. From its earliest reception among its first (Sesotho) readers, Chaka has been hailed as a masterpiece, yet also debated over as a “problem” text: an unsettled, unsettling, and possibly even dangerous mix of historical and ethnographic fact and literary invention.4 Generations of critics have disagreed about whether mission Christianity or an African worldview is the dominant framework for assessing Chaka's rise and fall, as the hero's tests (or the messiah's miracles) give way to the madman's massacres. Perhaps, as Bakhtin says, the boundaries between genres and narrative modes “are not laid up in heaven,” but at the birth of the novel in Africa, they were shaped by convergences and collisions between Christian missionary activity and extant traditions of verbal expression and cosmological belief.These historical and generic instabilities are bound up with ontological instabilities. The undecidability of a novel's form, I argue, is entangled with an uncertainty regarding the beings that people it—an uncertainty about what kinds of creatures its characters might be. Such multilayered instability manifests in the difficulty of parsing plot logics and character motivations; the multiple forces that shape Mofolo's novels obstruct any definitive, single understanding of why things happen in them, as I detail later. But these instabilities also involve a more fundamental question about the relationship between the novel form and its characters' forms of life: what counts as a life within the frame of the novel?—a question that I borrow from the organizers of the 2019 Novel symposium at Brown University, “Novel Life-Forms,” where this essay originated. This is another way of asking how literary genres such as the novel operate to unsettle or entrench what Sylvia Wynter calls “genres of the human,” by which she means successive historical descriptions of what the human is, or what counts as human. Entangled with epistemology and ideology, these human-authored “genres” tend to forget their contingent constructedness and instead mistake themselves for transcendent truth; this process of naturalization Wynter calls “occultation” (326). Of particular concern to Wynter is the “Western bourgeois . . . conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself” (260). The “politics of being” (318) names a struggle among competing descriptive statements (or “genres”) of the human.What this politics of being means for Mofolo and the novel is twofold. First, Mofolo's historical situation involved high-stakes contests among versions of the human—and not merely those assumed by Morija missionaries and their prospective Basotho converts, but also the several versions of “Man” assumed by South African settlers and the regimes that attempted to govern them. (This is another way of saying that Wynter's account of Man as the “Western bourgeois” version of the human is itself too monolithic—that is, “overrepresenting” as one single “genre” what are actually several genres.) Second, the bricolage that underwrites the novel form may be implicated in such encounters among disparate modes of being human. The extent to which characters can be understood to be human—and precisely what that claim to the human entails—may be connected to what kind of narrative they inhabit. In the case of Mofolo, I contend, it has been too easy to miss his deep, persistent concern with a particularly Basotho version of the human, so that literary critics have participated in the “overrepresentation” of Man by assuming that Mofolo's answer to the question of what it is to be a good human being (Wynter 271) would necessarily be that offered by European missionaries. (Mis)readings of Mofolo have tended to entrench the version of the human that is Man while missing his interest in what it means to be a motho, Sesotho for “human being.”To expand this point, consider that conventional readings of Mofolo have tacitly endorsed as the central tension underwriting his oeuvre a question first identified by “Molekoli” (Sesotho for “investigator” or “examiner”) in a 1911 review in the mission newspaper Leselinyana la Lesotho: “‘Is it the way of olden times that is good, or is the one observed in these days of progress the better one?’” (qtd. in Kunene, Thomas Mofolo 104–5). Framed in terms of this now-familiar tradition versus modernity dyad, the assumed trajectory of Mofolo's three published novels is not so unlike the three phases of the native intellectual in Fanon's “On National Culture.” Critics have tended to find an initial, total embrace of Christianity and repudiation of African culture in Moeti oa Bochabela, a quest narrative that borrows its narrative template from The Pilgrim's Progress—which, as Isabel Hofmeyr shows in The Portable Bunyan, proved in its malleability to be indispensable to Christian missionary activity on the continent and elsewhere. Mofolo's second novel, Pitseng, serialized in Leselinyana in 1909–10 and published in book form in April 1910 (and reviewed by Molekoli in 1911), is a loosely autobiographical narrative set in a remote village in Lesotho at the turn of the twentieth century; its plot traces the mission education, courtship, and marriage of two protégés of an idealized Mosotho Christian preacher/teacher. In stark contrast with Moeti, many critics have read Pitseng as endorsing the “old ways” of Basotho courtship and indicting the hypocrisy of European Christianity (and the mineral-driven economy in South Africa). Given this perceived oscillation between embrace and critique of European “civilization” in the first two novels, Chaka would take its place as a masterful resolution of this dialectic, even if Europeans appear only in an ominous prophecy at the novel's end. Alternatively, for Daniel Kunene, who translated Chaka (1981) and Pitseng (2013) into English, Mofolo depicts as irredeemably “evil” both Basotho custom in Moeti and the eponymous Zulu chief in Chaka, while also powerfully mobilizing Sesotho and isiZulu poetic and narrative traditions in his final published novel (see Kunene, Thomas Mofolo esp. 70, 111).5One way to complicate this neat critical narrative is to trace continuities across the three novels, the most salient of which to my argument is Mofolo's abiding interest in the “human.” Admittedly, the opening of Moeti seems to offer an inauspicious beginning for the African novel: In the black darkness, very black, in the times when the tribes were still eating each other like wild beasts, there lived a man [motho] called Fekisi. . . . The story of this man of whom we speak, we have said, is of old times, when this land of Africa was still clothed in great darkness, dreadful darkness, in which all the works of darkness were done. It is of the days when there was no strong chieftainship, the tribes still ate each other. (Traveler 1)Africa? It was dark. Full of cannibals. At first glance, this is terribly embarrassing: denigration at a continental scale that one might expect more from a Hegel or a Henry Morton Stanley than from the father of the African novel. “Pure mission stuff,” in Jahnheinz Jahn's estimation (101). But I want to insist that this “darkness of old” (as Mofolo titles the first chapter of Moeti) is in medias res and not actually very old: a darkness historical rather than primordial, ethno-national rather than continental or racial.The narrator's focus soon shifts from “this land of Africa” to the Basotho, as if to mark a world-historical eruption: this absolutely original work of the imagination announces itself in the grandest possible terms before zooming in to its local (or national) setting.6 What the narrator describes is not a static and timeless precolonial state of African savagery to be rescued by European civilization (read “Man”), but instead the ruined, desperate state of the Basotho less than a century earlier, after the profound social dislocation known as the difaqane or lifaqane (in isiZulu, mfecane), from approximately 1815–35. It was, in the words of Mofolo's contemporary Edward Motsamai, mehla ea malimo: “the time of the cannibals.” Motsamai's 1912 collection of Sesotho narratives under that title included stories collected from survivors of those days. Exacerbated by drought and crop failure, this period of “scattering” or “crushing” in the southeastern corner of the African subcontinent was catalyzed by the expansion of the Zulu empire. The Basotho were among the vanquished ethnic polities fleeing fearsome Zulu armies and their scorched earth tactics, led by Shaka until his death in 1828.7 Leaving crops and livestock behind as they ran from the “cloud of red dust . . . out of the east” that signaled destruction (qtd. in Thompson 26), some Basotho turned to cannibalism to survive. When, in 1833, French and Swiss PEMS missionaries arrived in Lesotho—an autonomous territory ruled by the chief Moshoeshoe, unconquered by Britons or Boers—they were fully aware of this recent history and its ongoing disruption of every aspect of Basotho life. In other words, to dismiss the opening of Moeti as parroting “mission” discourse is to disregard the PEMS missionaries' understanding of their prospective converts' historical plight.8The historical and cultural imprint of this relatively recent, much-lamented “time of the cannibals” is legible across Mofolo's oeuvre, but one must read it back to front and against the grain to grasp the coherence of his concerns. By back to front, I mean that Mofolo's final published novel, Chaka, narrates the difaqane and identifies Chaka as the force behind it: “It was through Chaka that the difaqane came into existence, the time when people ate each other, and stole or took by force what belonged to others” (153). Chaka is the “originator-of-all-things-evil”; cannibalism was “the worst of all of the evil things of those days” (137). The final chapters of Mofolo's last novel, Chaka, describe the horrors of this unprecedented time in the 1820s, which retrospectively sets the stage for the “darkness of old” described in the first pages of Mofolo's first novel, Moeti. The “days when there was no strong chieftainship” were followed by the reign of Moshoeshoe, under whose benevolent rule the Basotho nation emerged out of those dark days when “the tribes still ate each other” (Traveller 1).This historical rupture is legible from the opening pages of Chaka; the narrator repeatedly asks readers to think back to the time “in the beginning,” “long ago, when the people were still settled on the land”; that is, the time before “the sufferings . . . occasioned by the difaqane . . . [when] the nations were living in peace, each one in its own original territory where it had been” since the time of creation (1, 3, 4). These references to the “still settled” past, along with the narrator's interjections that “the reader must remember” how different everything used to be, imply that Mofolo's early twentieth-century Basotho readers have been repeatedly unsettled, dwelling for more than a century in a zone of occult instability. The initial force behind this spectacular dislocation, however, was not European evangelization or conquest but instead the expansion of the Zulu empire—a historical dynamic that complicates overly simplistic and binary, before-and-after accounts of African history that have become familiar in postcolonial, and more particularly, recent settler-colonial and decolonial studies. The story of Chaka, to adapt Chinua Achebe's formulation, is a story of how the rain began to beat the Basotho: how the people were unsettled from the land. For Mofolo, that rain had a name, and it was Shaka.In order to grasp the consistency and coherence of Mofolo's concerns, one must read his oeuvre not only historically back to front, but also ideologically against the grain. A Christian moral framework of good and evil has shaped the reception of Mofolo, precisely because of his overdetermined relationship to the Morija mission: he was not only a product of PEMS mission education but also worked at the Morija Printing Works and Sesuto Book Depot in various capacities (personal assistant, correspondence secretary, proofreader, translator, journalist, reviewer) beginning in 1899 and again between 1904 and 1910, the period during which he wrote his novels. Yet the Christian framework is inadequate, arguably less helpful in understanding Mofolo's oeuvre than the Basotho social ethos of botho, or human compassion, “regard for others” (Chaka 72; Krog 91). (A motho, as suggested earlier, is one who has botho.) To be sure, given the history of the region, the analytic of mission Christianity is unavoidable and necessary, but it has been “overrepresented” (to borrow Wynter's term) in the reception of Mofolo, so that his abiding concern with botho has largely receded from view.From the first page of Moeti to the denouement of Chaka, Mofolo's oeuvre is shot through with botho as its guiding ethos. The opposite of botho is bophoofolo, “brute life” or “beast-like nature” (Casalis 303; Mofolo, Chaka 128; see also Chaka 83). The negation of botho is cannibalism, “which changes people from subjects, whose common botho is to be recognised and celebrated, to consumable objects” (Lilford 383). Between the paragraphs about darkness on the first page of Moeti, its hero, Fekisi, is described repeatedly as a motho: a human being “in the full meaning of the word,” “in grief and joy; in good fortune and bad; in hunger and plenty” (Traveller 1).9 Fekisi is the epitome of botho, even in the dreadful dark days of the cannibals; despairing what he sees as the irredeemable absence of botho among the Basotho, Fekisi travels east seeking truth. In Pitseng the preacher Katse is a model for the nation, “a man of kindness, who felt the pain of other people . . . [and] had a good heart” (22–24, 16). Katse's protégé Alfred Phakoe travels around neighboring South Africa and discovers that white people “have respect for nothing when they are after [gold and diamonds], not even people's lives” (55). This lack of human compassion echoes Basotho migrant laborers' accounts of the South African mining industry as cannibalistic, eating up those who work there rather than treating them “with compassion and dignity like human beings,” as literary critic Limakatso Chaka writes (Coplan 7; Chaka 78). Chaka describes botho as a dynamic and processual state; people become human, or lose their humanity, as Chaka is repeatedly said to do as his ambition expands and he renounces mercy and compassion (41); eventually “the last spark of humanity still remaining in him was utterly and finally extinguished. . . . [H]is human nature died totally and irretrievably, and a beast-like nature [bophoofolo] took possession of him” (127–28).As a child, Chaka receives a blessing that he “should grow to become both a human being and a man of worth” (6); the novel fleshes out this distinction, almost illegible or nonsensical in Kunene's English translation, between motho and monna, human and man (see Chaka 82). To be a good human being is not the same as being a “man of worth,” not to mention a good warrior or a good king. Chaka confronts the contradictions among these states: only with difficulty can one be a good human being and a good man and warrior and king. Yet such is the quality of Chaka's mentor and protector, Dingiswayo, who is valorized for “tr[ying] to instil the spirit of humanity into his people,” trying “to instil in the nation the spirit of human compassion, so that they might refrain from attacking each other for no reason” (161, 105). The tragic aspect of Chaka's fate is that in claiming the suprahuman status of a god, Chaka loses his humanity and becomes instead a monstrous beast, devoid of compassion and unable to discern friend from foe.The distinction between human and man underwrites fundamental questions of leadership, in Chaka and beyond. Drawing on Limakatso Chaka's discussion of botho and arguing for its salience in Chaka, Antjie Krog (91) emphasizes the exhortation to Chaka by a mysterious ancestral voice that anoints him as a leader who will “rule over nations and their kings . . . over peoples of diverse traditions . . . over the winds and the sea storms”; “Yet you must go by the right path,” Chaka hears the voice warn (Mofolo, Chaka 24). Instead of Molekoli's question about whether the old ways or the “ways of progress” are better, I understand all of Mofolo's protagonists to be propelled by a rather different question, What is the right path?— if “rightness” is understood to be a social value of human compassion rather than a moral value of Christian righteousness whose opposite, sin/evil, is transgression against God.10“You must go by the right path!” could also be a motto for Fanon's analysis of the pitfalls confronting national liberation movements in the mid-twentieth century, in the grip of the Cold War. This is not to say that Fanon was an exponent of botho, although his slightly stretched Marxian humanism does shine through in the concluding exhortation of The Wretched of the Earth: “For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man” (316). Instead, it is to suggest that Mofolo's oeuvre can be read as a meditation on leadership and its failings in a moment of historical dislocation—or, rather, in two such moments: both the early nineteenth-century difaqane and the early twentieth-century present.In southern Africa, the new century's first decade brought new challenges: after the 1899–1902 South African War, the prospect of British colonies and Boer republics amalgamating into a single state prompted hope and then despair, both for Black S