The banal, the false and the half true in dons’ diatribes

The University of Nairobi's main entrance. FILE PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • He cites Andrew Gurr as having said “there were no such things as universal literatures and universal cultures.”
  • The question is, who doesn’t know this? Literature is produced in a given culture; and there are no universal cultures, otherwise they would not be called cultures.
  • Gurr could not have said anything different. The point I want to make is that Prof Amuka is using an old trick from the Postmodernist playbook: You say something that is obvious and commonplace, but you package it as a  far-reaching observation.
  • The issue has never been about universal literatures and universal cultures: The issue is about universal values, the values that bind us together as members of the human family.

Allow me to react to what Prof Peter Amuka and Prof Evan Mwangi said about my views on Postmodernism and Postcolonialism here sometime ago.

I  joined the University of Nairobi in 1970 and graduated in 1973; and the change in the literature syllabus that Prof Amuka talked about didn’t take place in the late 1960s, but in 1974. The young Peter Amuka came to the Department of Literature at the tail end of Prof Andrew Gurr’s tenure as chair, that is 1973, which was also the year the professor went back to the UK. As a literature major, I took all of the courses the British professor taught, including the one called Shakespeare and Tolstoy, billed as a comparative study of two major literary cultures. Prof Amuka invokes the name of a scholar he barely knew. 

He cites Andrew Gurr as having said “there were no such things as universal literatures and universal cultures.” The question is, who doesn’t know this? Literature is produced in a given culture; and there are no universal cultures, otherwise they would not be called cultures. Gurr could not have said anything different. The point I want to make is that Prof Amuka is using an old trick from the Postmodernist playbook: You say something that is obvious and commonplace, but you package it as a  far-reaching observation. The issue has never been about universal literatures and universal cultures: The issue is about universal values, the values that bind us together as members of the human family.

Amuka refers to a course Prof Gurr taught him in his first year. I had taken the same course two years before him: It was called ‘Introduction to the Novel’. When I took it, the  professor would make references to Leo Tolstoy’s Anna  Karenina as the best novel ever written. The professor would then add: “I don’t think any of you have read this novel.” For me, this was ironic because I had read it during my A-levels.

So, maybe Prof Gurr had changed his teaching style when Prof Amuka took the course; but if the style was the same, then the probability is that one of his students called Peter Amuka wasn’t paying attention. Otherwise, the Moi University professor would not be using Gurr’s name to argue against hierarchies in literary compositions.

The good professor contradicts himself. On the one hand Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a British text, on the other a Postmodernist like him can read it as a world text. Ha! Ha! So there is world literature! This play, according to our professor, can be equated to a riddle. But the play itself contains a riddle, the riddle of the grave diggers, which Shakespeare uses for comic relief. So, the complex dramatic edifice, which contains a riddle among many other features, can be placed on the same level with a riddle. This is assuming the professor has read and watched Shakespeare’s longest and most accomplished  play.

Amuka  plays another trick on the reader and one that is typical of Postmodernists: dodging or deflecting the issue at hand. I am of course referring to the question of the poor writing skills of our students.

The professor doubles down on what he insists on calling a revolution that was spearheaded by the trio: Ngugi, Anyumba, and Taban. But he is completely silent about the misery the products of this so-called revolution are experiencing when it comes to communication. He makes me feel like I was talking to a wall; but let me remind him, and the nation as a whole, about the unforgivable sins our teachers of English are committing. If they are not writing compositions for students and asking them to cram them for exams, they are telling them that a good composition is one with a generous sprinkling of big words and idiomatic expressions, a far cry from what all writing experts would recommend. To these experts, the simplest English is the best; and anything that is worth saying can be said simply and clearly. But it would appear from the professor’s loud  silence that the inability of our students to write well to him is neither here nor there, preoccupied as he is with a revolution that never was. Well, they say that in a terrain that is flat, even molehills look like mountains. Prof Mwangi has problems with the notion of the universal, although he teaches in America. For the record, let me say Mwangi is one of my former students who make me feel good in my retirement.

In my forty-plus years at the University of Nairobi, I’m yet to meet a better student. When I supervised his PhD thesis, I never had to tell him where to put a comma or how to use a semicolon. 

Self-inflicted anxieties

But to respond to his self-inflicted anxieties about the concept of the universal, let me tell him a little story. In 2000, when I was in Japan as a visiting professor at Soka University, the president of the institution asked me to give a public lecture. I asked: “What do you want me to talk about?” He said: “Anything. The choice is yours.” So, I decided to talk about and perform Luhya wedding songs. Luhya wedding songs typically subvert, often in a satirical manner, the solemnity and the romance associated with such events. And they do so in two ways: One, they tell you that marriage is a difficult, even painful experience; two, that there is nothing special about the person you’re marrying. In other words, the songs inject naked and unflattering realism in an otherwise sacred occasion.

There was no black face among my first audience of 250 people. But don’t get me wrong: I’m neither a great singer nor a great  dancer. All the same, the audience seemed to have liked what they saw and what they heard, and they spread the news that there was a professor from Africa who performed in his public lectures.

The administration then asked me to repeat the lecture on another day, and this time my audience ballooned to 500. In this next one, one strikingly beautiful Japanese woman stood up during question time and said: “Professor, I’m getting  married next month. I’ll remember what you have said.” And one of the men in the audience cornered me at the exit and asked me to write my name on his white T-shirt. “I’m never going to wash it,” he said.

More tellingly, the founder of the university, Dr Daiska  Ikeda, after he heard about my public lectures, invited me to co-author a book with him on literature. The book is called Dialogue on World Literature, and it was published  in 2001. It is the book that always reminds me of how my name is written in Japanese characters. 

I suspect Prof Mwangi allowed his anti-racist racism to run away with him when he said: “Without Postcolonialism, probably even Achebe’s Things Fall Apart would still be an obscure text from a primitive part of Africa.” My experience is markedly different. This novel was my O-level set book back in 1967, and my English teacher at Friends School Kamusinga was a Briton called Richard Petit. Petit thought very highly of this work, at one point describing it as “a competent psychological study of  Okonkwo.” And when I was in America in the mid-1970s, Things Fall Apart was the one African book you would always find in American bookshops. This was long before white people decided to vote for Barack Obama as president, not once but twice!

As I conclude this rejoinder, let me take you back to Prof Amuka and what he said about the generation of new knowledge. The professor says rather glibly: “The world has as many knowledges as the uncountable cultures it carries.” This may be true, but one needs to find the knowledge in each culture. The other day, I shocked my Masters class when I told them, according to reliable statistics, Africa, with more than a billion people, was contributing only 2 per cent of the new knowledge being produced in the world. To dramatise this point, I told them that while the Amukas of Nyanza were ruminating on the pseudo-profundities of Postcolonialism, a Briton by the name Peter Firstbrook came to their neighbourhood, did primary research and published a book on the genealogy  of the Obamas titled The Obamas: The Untold Story of an African Family. An American called Sally Jacobs came to Kenya, researched the life of Obama Sr, going all the way to Kogelo and Maseno, and wrote what I regard as a compelling biography entitled The Other Barack: The Bold and Wreckless Life of President Obama’s Father. The poor lady endured ill health and hostility from those who mistakenly thought she had a Republican agenda in telling the story of the father of the Kenyan-American who had ascended to the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth.

No, Prof Amuka and Prof Mwangi: Please, hear me out. Partly because of these unserviceable theories, we have an underperforming academic class. And this underperformance unfortunately feeds into our political culture.