Simon Gikandi: Neglected at home, respected abroad

It is not always that Research in African Literatures, easily one of the leading journals on literature the world over, dedicates a part of a whole issue to the critical work of a single individual, as it has done to Kenyan critic Simon Gikandi’s powerfully written Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011).

We are more likely to see such dedications to works of fiction, which critics then take various approaches to unpack.

That is why we may want to pay attention to this book that has won many major awards in the United States, including the Melbern Glasscock Center for Humanities Research, Texas A&M University; the Melville Herskovits Award for the most important scholarly work in African studies; and the James Russell Lowell Prize for an outstanding scholarly work by a member of the Modern Languages Association.

In Slavery and the Culture of Taste, Gikandi shows how the related processes of slavery, slave trade and enslavement, violence ridden as they were, led to the emerging theories and praxes of taste and aesthetics, as well as notions of ‘culture’ and ‘gentleman’.

In doing this, he develops the concept of ‘the changing aura of blackness’ in arguing that, while the peak of European Enlightenment period of 18th century coincided with the lowest levels of denigrating Blacks, especially from Africa, and providing the perfect pretext for their enslavement, there were times before when Africans and ‘other people of colour’ were treated as equal, if exotic human beings, capable of having a sharp sense of fashion as culture, for instance of the envoys that the Christian king of the Congo Kingdom sent to the Dutch governor in 1643.

Nor were the later sentiments of Blacks ‘inferiority’ unanimously held by Europeans even of those times of transoceanic slave trade; indeed, some of the leading thinkers of the time, including the poet William Blake and the Dutch painter Harmenszoon van Rijn Rembrandt, had works that significantly celebrated the humanity of Blacks and, for Blake, emphasised the inhumanity of slavery.

Josiah Wedgwood, around 1791, carved the Jasper Medallion, whose image of a slave in chains iconically captured powerfully his disapproval of slavery and the fate of blacks in it.

Perhaps Gikandi’s greatest contribution in this important book is in his extension of Walter Rodney’s thesis of how Europe underdeveloped Africa, by showing how the same European development at the expense of the enslaved Blacks, paradoxically relied on the same Blacks not just for commercial and material improvement, but also notional and abstract ideals of culture, sophistication and civilization.

Slavery and the Culture of Taste similarly pushes further the question that Paul Gilroy asks in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness: What is the place and role of the African in the making of contemporary Western notions of modernity?

Of course, it is inconceivable that anyone can write a book about which they will get all praises. In the current issue of Research in African Literatures, notable critics Ato Quayson, Olaniyan Tejumola, Kenneth Harrow and Adeeko Adeleke, while finding strong points in Gikandi’s award-winning book, also ask probing questions on some of the problems the book may pose.

Adeeko wonders why Gikandi focuses more on the West African coast for his research, and not the hinterlands where slavery and slave trade has been less studied, while Harrow seems to quarrel with Gikandi’s failure or unwillingness to clarify the dialectical relationship that governed both the slave master and the slave.

For Quayson, Gikandi does not acknowledge the overlaps between slavery and taste, while Tejumola is uneasy with Gikandi’s suggestion of newness in studying the margins that have actually been studied before.

Yet these questions do not take away much from the monumental stature of the book.

LIMITS

Indeed, Gikandi’s own response to these critics is that he acknowledges limits of explanations, where what is known as obvious and central in some quarters remains alien and peripheral in others, hence the need to focus on what may be (un)known areas if only to pry open new chambers of knowledge.

Gikandi seems to have been guided by this view throughout his career as a critic, if we may use, for guiding purposes, the books he has thus far published.

When Reading the African Novel was published in 1987, Clive Wake, then an Emeritus Professor of Modern French and African Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury, praised it as ‘a most sensitive, perceptive, intelligent and mature piece of literary criticism’, noting especially how Gikandi dealt with the elusive style of irony.

Even then, he settled on ‘old’ works to say ‘new’ things about the African novel, beginning with Camara Laye’s The African Child and The Radiance of the King, to Achebe’s Arrow of God and Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine.

Later on, Gikandi’s Reading Chinua Achebe (1991) and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2002) again took the same trajectory of adding his voice to an already existing archive of critical works on novels and writers widely celebrated, while Maps of Englishness (1996) and The Columbia Guide to East African Literature in English Since 1945 (2007, co-authored with Evan Mwangi), adopted the geographical and survey approach to illuminate literatures from East Africa through time.

His other works, books like Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature as well as the numerous journal articles and book chapters have similarly been situated in the same tradition of drawing on existing theoretical tools to nuance ideas that one would think are well settled.

DO NOT KEEP PACE

This, in my view, is the more difficult path of scholarship because it calls for more rigorous orientation to the discipline.

It is like that musician who maintains a distinct and attractive voice in a mass choir, or an instrumentalist who stands out in an orchestral performance; these are harder to achieve than one would imagine and, I believe, it is for this reason that Gikandi’s reputation as a literary and cultural critic has soared to the level where he can be considered the leading Kenyan literary and cultural critic today.

Yet, apart from his Reading the African Novel that circulated fairly widely in Kenyan universities earlier on, we do not seem to keep pace with his influential works that have enjoyed greater circulation and citations in other parts of the world, especially North America, Europe and West Africa.

If the relatively poor show of Gikandi’s works in Kenya had happened in the 90s or even before 2010, we would have had a wonderfully compelling excuse for not using the works in our teaching by citing the fact that his books are mainly published overseas, and therefore not readily available locally.

Unfortunately for us, Amazon.com and its competitors, to say nothing of the electronic sources that our university libraries subscribe to now, have robbed us of this attractive explanation and so we must seek answers elsewhere.

In fact, it is not just Gikandi’s published works that we seem to pay scanty attention to; we do not seem to think of him when shopping for keynote speakers in the many ‘international’ conferences that we have variously organised in our universities in Kenya.

I think that one way of enhancing our literary and cultural scholarship locally is to follow that old dictum that we seem to ignore, which is that ‘knowledge is based on acknowledgement’.

That way, we shall extensively use the works of Gikandi and other Kenyan critics now based elsewhere to extend our critical and theoretical reach, and enthusiastically welcome initiatives such as the one by Research in African Literatures of dedicating an entire Reviews Section to one work by a Kenyan scholar who seems best known to be Kenyan by non-Kenyans.

Godwin Siundu teaches Literature at the University of Nairobi