“Mojuba: the African Autobiography as
Ancestral Reverence”
Africans place paramount importance upon children
and ancestors. It is a common belief in many African communities, regardless of
language or cultural nuances, that ancestors are reincarnated through our
children. In African mentality, the idea of living honorably
and living a dignified legacy is just as much to make one’s ancestors proud as
to also leave a Proud example for one’s own children to follow. When ancestors
are proud of their descendents, they may reincarnate as a child in the same
family bloodline, sometimes reincarnating again and again as young children,
such as abiku, heavily mentioned in
by Soyinka in Ake (Soyinka, p 16-17).
Many African spiritual groups have
elaborate ceremonies or small devotional rituals giving respect and remembrance
to the Dearly Departed, as evidenced in Soyinka's stories, in which he mentions
egungun again and again, literally
translated as “bones of my bones”. It is in acts of ancestral reverence that Africans and other indigenous
cultures (such as Japanese Shinto and Norse Asatru traditions) feel perhaps more
palpably a sense of humanity: humbled while reciting the names and pouring
libation for those that came before, and feeling a part of a long thread of
Collective [Un/Sub]Conscious, one who actively remembers and invokes the
ancestors realizes a single human being is never actually alone. Likewise, it
is in having and raising children that one’s Divinity and Immortality is ultimately
realized and, perhaps fleetingly, however abstractly or figuratively, attained.
A child is a reflection of the parent’s story, a testament and affirmation of
one’s own survival, which brings reassurance that, by looking into the faces of
children, a man or woman can see and know the evidence of the long line of ancestors
who begat them. The very act of birth and its dependency on and interrelation
with the act of death confirms the parents’ story will live on because science
has even proven memory is passed down through DNA. African American Civil
Rights leader and revolutionary Stokley Carmichael wrote about the Afrocentric
community concept and the importance of celebrating children as ancestors
returned, in order to celebrate the identity not only of the child, but the
entire community, ethnic group, nation, the African continent, and the African
Diaspora in the Americas and Caribbean:
Among many West African
peoples from among whom our ancestors were seized, whenever a child is born, a
birth poem or praise song is composed in its honor. Among the Yoruba [the
Nigerian ethnic group which Wole Soyinka himself is apart of] this birth poem
is called oriki. Some days later at
the naming ceremony by which the infant is ushered formally into its place in
human society, the child’s oriki is recited publicly, first into the ear of the
child and then to the assembled community of family and neighbors. The first
language a child will be required to commit to memory, the oriki imprints the
child with its complex historical, spiritual, and social identities….[Oriki] is
at once prayer, thanksgiving, celebration, and prophecy. It is a meditation on
the meaning and significance of the new human’s name. It is an evocation of the
strong deeds, character, and praise names of the infant’s ancestors, and,
perhaps most important, it is an optimistic attempt to project (and define) in
desirable ways the child’s future personality and life prospects. By evoking
lineage, the oriki is ultimately about spiritual inheritance: that eternal life
force that has many names (Ase among the Yoruba), which we receive from our
ancestors. A vital force of which we, in each generation, are only the
contemporary incarnations. And which in turn we pass on to our children and
they do theirs, so that the lineage never dies….Oriki, while memory and
history, is also character, at once both individual and collective. Individual
because each human being has his or her own particular and unique oriki.
Collective because being anchored in lineage, it is fundamentally about group
identity. We Africans know that each individual one of us is ultimately the sum
of that long line of ancestors—spiritual forces and moral arbiters—who have gone
before to produce us. The psychic forces out of which we all come. In this
sense oriki is a salute to family. It is also an inheritance one acquires at
birth. (Carmichael, pp 11-12)
In J. Nozipo Maraire’s Zenzele: A Letter for My Daughter, the narrator Amai Zenzele
reveals her inverted reflection in her daughter, and her duty and desire to
pass down as an inheritance the secrets of her life (which, in themselves,
contain the secrets of her ancestors, her community, her African continent, the
continent itself a Mother):
We have the same eyes,
you and I. But yours are still vulnerable. They are candid and honest; like a
scrupulous documentary, they take note of all of the details of life. And all
of the world is reflected there—the beautiful and the wretched alike. My eyes
are resigned to observe, detached, from some distance. They want no part; they
do not take in. They keep out. In your company, I often feel blind, groping for
firm objects, hesitant lest I collide with some obstacle I cannot characterize,
let alone surmount. Ah, but your fingers are truly mine, long, dark, and graceful.
And those clumsy lips, they are mine, too. They fall and tense and bend into
every shape. They are never still, never without expression….I have learned
something in my awkward journey through womanhood. The lessons are few, but
enduring. So I hope that you will pardon this curious distillation of
traditional African teaching, social commentary, and maternal concern. These
are the stories that have made me what I am today. It is just that you are my
very own, and it is an old woman’s privilege to impart her wisdom. It is all I
have to give to you, Zenzele. (Maraire, pp 4-5)
Africans place emphasis on respectability in the
sense of setting good examples for children and leading an honorable life that
does not shame one's family name or heritage. So it is indeed especially
shameful to the parents for the new generation children to eschew such rich
traditions in favor of disobedience characteristic of the "rebellious
American [or otherwise Western] spirit".
"I don't know what to do, Amai Zenzele.
Somewhere we did something wrong....when independence came, we celebrated with
tears in our eyes! The country was ours! We would continue the struggle to
ensure that our children received every opportunity of Western privilege. The
whites had hoarded the pleasures and advantages of our nation for too long. My
God, there were horse-riding and French lessons, video games, and trips to
London and New York. There was nothing that our children asked for that we
denied them. We who had grown up knowing only deprivation, austerity, and hard
labor. We wanted only the best for them. We even sent them to the best private
schools with plenty of whites." ....She waved her arms around the sitting
room, helplessly. The room was like a museum of African assimilation. On the
far wall were shelves of video games, movies, and a computer.....the room, with
its rich golden carpeting and matching velvet sofas, was the Zimbabwean's
version of Western sophistication...."But it was all in vain. They have
neither respect nor gratitude"…When I left…I understood [Amai Stephen]’s
predicament as well. All of the peri-independent generation shared a common
vision of a better life. Unfortunately, too many of us had translated this into
a material definition of success. We developed all the symptoms of the
postcolonial syndrome, endemic to Africa: acquisition, imitation, and a paucity
of imagination. We simply rushed to secure what the colonialists had…we denied
our own culture, relieved to leave our primitive origins far away, in some
forgotten village…we created an invisible white line or ultimate aspiration: to
achieve what the Europeans had…we ceased to dream, to have our own vision of
happiness and success. We were able to carry on this face with aplomb, but our
children were getting caught in some gray zone that was neither black culture
nor truly white either. (Maraire, pp 12-13, 17-18)
In the face of this schism, this cultural
rebellion and betrayal, African parents, no longer able to solidify their
traditions in their children simply by passing them through their loins, resort
now to picking up the pen to solidify the once oral and mystical traditional
wisdom into the European’s Written Word. “If you want to hide something from a
Black man, put it in a book,” the old saying goes, yet the African parents writing
autobiographies to pass to their children, often in the form of letters such as
Maraire’s and Magona’s works, are doing the opposite: putting it in books they
immortalize their culture and assert autonomy over their stories (rewriting,
literally, blindly accepted Eurocentric HIS-story), revealing to a wider world
what was once whispered around campfires and sung in cryptic lullabies. In a
review of Sindiwe Magona’s To My
Children’s Children and Mother to
Mother, Meg Samuelson writes:
Sindiwe Magona's autobiography, To
My Children's Children (1990),
and her fictionalized account of the Amy Biehl killing, Mother to Mother (1998), provide a rich comparative
framework in which to consider the construction of the narrating voice and the
addressee….. To My
Children's Children opens by locating the speaking act
(recourse is made to the oral, not written, tradition) in the culturally
specific role of a Xhosa grandmother. Although there are (repressed) schisms
within this voice, it sets itself up as one that emerges from a stable identity.
The proclaimed aim of this autobiographical act (telling "my" story)
is to conserve, record, and transmit the culture and traditions of "my
people"--the amaXhosa -- to her grandchildren (1). Here we see Magona
justifying the "private" act of autobiography (writing the self) by
turning it into a communal act, locating it within a culturally ordained,
"authentic" sphere: orally transmitted cultural values. Thus the
constructed voice and its placing of the addressee deflect the individualism
implied in the act of writing. That the narrator's voice slips out of its
ostensible function as a communal voice (and reveals this to be a rhetorical
strategy) becomes apparent when Magona drops the address to the "child of
the child of my child" after the fourth chapter, only to hastily recover
it in the closing sentence. The maternal identity, I will therefore argue,
should not be taken purely at face value but should be read far more
ambivalently as a voice torn by competing pressures. On the one hand, Magona is
invoking textual strategies in order to write her story within the conventional
politics of the time. On the other, we cannot but help see this device of
constituting herself as a mother in/of the community as being, at times, a
screen behind which Magona attempts the more private act of recuperating a
stable individual self. What the voice she constructs claims to conserve is the
locus of community. (Samuelson, pp 1-2)
The
African voice of the community is often attributed to the elders, such as those
keepers of wisdom Amai Zenzele in Maraire’s work refers to: “even the
‘ancients’ as you call them, with their interminable, glorious epic tales of
battles waged and won and village life before the white man came—they are our
living history…our library (Maraire, p 7).” The elders are perceived as the
keepers of the village’s moral standards and spiritual convictions, they are
also the shapers of socialization: the foundation upon which the example is
based for how the citizens of the village should carry themselves with respect.
Looking back now, I can clearly see how iintsomi are an essential and integral
part of the socialization of the child among the amaXhosa. The lazy youngster
who would not bother to learn from his or her elders was punished; usually he or
she ended up without a spouse because no one would marry such a sluggard.
Always, good behavior was rewarded and bad punished. (Magona, p5)
Wole
Soyinka’s luminal masterpiece Ake
shapes Soyinka himself as a sort of trickster god, almost unreliable narrator,
the child speaking through the adult’s mouth, writing through the adult’s pen
precisely as the adult self sees his child self. Like the Esu-Elegbara
crossroads deity the Yoruba tribe worship—the social-spiritual culture that
Soyinka himself was born into—Soyinka straddles the fence between innocence and
age, ignorance and perception, a child’s place and an elder’s authority, a
child’s hope and an old man’s careful certainty and mortgaged regret. Soyinka’s
middle existence between youth and adulthood signifies modernity or
Eurocentrism as a sort of “growing up,” as if the magic of the traditional
spiritual practices are acceptable as a child, but as an adult he engages in
the more existential, philosophical intellectual activities of analyzing
Christian doctrine rather than engaging ritually in the lively and living
ceremonies of his people. Sindiwe Magona expresses a similar sentiment in To My Children’s Children revealing:
This straddling of two worlds, the world of school
and of “civilization” and the world of ancestor worship, witchdoctors, and
traditional rites, often created disagreements in our home. “What do the teachers know?” [My mother’s]
stock phrase meant “case closed!” Even when resourceful Jongi would resort to:
“But we are safe. We have been fortified remember? Remember the witchdoctor?”
it was to no avail. “He didn’t fortify you against suicide,” mother would
retort, adding, “and I didn’t send you to school to find out you have a mouth!”
Who could argue with such wisdom? …After
the weekend celebrations I would go to school as usual. I had to come to accept
the existence of two far from compatible worlds, the one my world of
traditions, rites, and ancestor worship, and the other, the world of
“civilization” that included school. (Magona, p54, 65)
Between Yoruba
traditional religion (Ifa) and Christnianity, Soyinka grows to seamlessly
syncretise the two with as much adeptness as Yoruba descendents of the Slave
Trade did when creating new Creole-Caribbean versions of the Ifa faith naming
them “Santeria” in Cuba, “Voodoo” in Haiti and New Orleans, and “Geechee” in
South Carolina and Savannah, GA. This syncretism is evident in his
identification with and possessiveness over a rock outside of Sunday School
meeting. The possessiveness over
the rock, although seemingly absurd to the western interpreters, is indicative
of a connection to Eshu Elegbara, or Eleggua as He is known in Cuba, Exu as he
is known in Brazil. This Yoruba deity is the African equivalent of the Norse
Odin/Wotan, The Greco-Roman Hermes/Mercury, and the Hindu Genesha. This deity
is often personified, consecrated, and/or embodied in idols or icons made out
of rocks, particularly the sacred Laterite stone. Another
example of such syncretism is hinted at in an early chapter of Ake in which, the young Wole asks if St.
Peter is an egungun. An egungun in Yoruba language and belief
means literally “bones of my bones”—in other words, egungun are the ancestors or our Collective Dearly Departed. Egungun ceremonies such as the ones
Soyinka describes with such vivid detail and obvious joy are powerful and awe-inspiring,
allowing for an ancestral spirit to “mount” or temporarily reside within an
entranced performer’s body while in the sacred colorful multi-layered egungun cloth robes. However, the
elaborate ceremonies and costumes aside, egungun
are still, for all intents and understood purposes, literally regarded as the
Holy Dead, a collective of ancestral spirits from one’s immediate bloodline and
ancient lineages, sometimes even including past lives. Therefore, although
belittled and casually dismissed by the uninformed reader literally lost in
translation, the child Soyinka who so adamantly regards St. Peter as an egungun is in fact correct, as St. Peter
too is an Elevated or Deified Ancestor, or once
living human being, just as all the other human beings. Of note as well is
the documented fact that many slaves—and to this very day, their descendents--
syncretised and identified St. Peter as Eshu-Elegbara or Haitian Papa Legba or
Cuban Eleggua (Akinkunle B: 2-3). This Eshu-like liminality the Wise Child Wole
Soyinka displays is alluded to in an intriguing article comparing the
exploration of abiku in Ake as follows:
In Wole Soyinka's
autobiography Ake, the middle-aged Soyinka resurrects the child Wole. This
exceptional child breaks down the boundaries between Yoruba and English, the
wild and the Christian, the town and the parsonage, Yoruba and Western-style
schooling, Ake quarters and the rest of Yorubaland. Gender and generational
barriers crumble when he becomes pivotal, as errand boy, in the women's rebellion
against taxation in Ake. These daughters, including his mother, Wild Christian,
break patriarchal law and unseat the Alake from his throne for his intransigence and his apparent support for colonialism. Wole never
forgets this history-in-the-making. However, the autobiography is a safari of the self, as Soyinka conjures
the ghost of a past self and, as abiku, thrives in many spheres. In keeping
with the genre, he cannot help but sell his self. He tacitly acknowledges that
he inherits his rebellious spirit from his courageous, revolutionary,
"wild" mothers. Shifting from the matrifocal, he also recognizes the gift
of courage and acuity from his grandfather, and he mentions his debt to his
intellectual father. Nonetheless, his mother, named Wild Christian, (16) presumably by Wole at the ripe, old age of three, embodies the
unbridled and puritan spirits that are part of Soyinka, the writer. Wole names
his father Essay by fusing the father's fragmented initials-S.A.--into a word
to conjure the cerebral, writing world. Wole and Soyinka reverse the parent-child
power base when Wole renames his mother and father and Sayinka reproduces them
textually. If his parents named him in Yoruba, Wole--'step in (and stay),' to
borrow Clark's abiku phrasing--names them in English. Through word power,
Soyinka transplants them from a Yoruba milieu into an Anglicized domain by
writing in English. Wole's parents are not really Soyinka's parents but traces
of them in a mimetic space (Uncredited/Free Library, p 1-3)
In Country of My Skull, what we have essentially is a strange hybrid
of confessional, transcription, and autobiography. We have an amalgam of
pseudo-fiction, embellished facts that become “truer than true” and even
instances where the accounts of several real persons are combined into one
invented character’s slightly questionable, yet cohesive and moving, narrative.
Controversy rides this formidable volume offered by the white Afrikaner Antjie
Krog on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s native black witnesses and
their recounts of truly gruesome racial violence inflicted upon them at the
hands of whites during the recent—and still stinging—oppressive hegemony of
1990s apartheid…. Krog acts as a witness of the witnessing: reporting and
transcribing the events, she is not only court recorder and is not covering the
Commission hearings with velvet gloved journalistic objectivity, but instead
finds herself engaged in and engaging with the channeling of these vivid
memories, an unsettling, though some say cathartic, experience…. Indeed, Krog
has made a lasting testament out of a
guided testimony (Akinkunle, 1-2). Country of My Skull is a strange
inclusion to the collection of African autobiography summarized here; It is not
strictly the biography of the testifiers or of Antjie Krog herself—instead, it
is more of an autobiography informing how she
reacted to and felt about the confessions she has transcribed from the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission. The autobiography becomes more like a communal
biography, wherein Krog realizes through her own intertwined testimony that their story/ies are in fact hers. As a white Afrikaner, Krog is in a
strange place of exclusive inclusivity: white, she is a foreign entity in
cultural mentality and appearance, even if she were born on African soil; yet,
she is also undeniably and inextricably part of the community and the history
because without the European invasion the victims’ testimonies she herself
recounts from the Commission would never have been told, never heard, because
it never would have happened. Although she is not personally to blame, her dual
citizenship implies her culpability. Again, just as with the other biographies,
ancestry is a large part: Krog’s white ancestors are the spectres haunting the
history of the Black Africans’ ancestors and futures of the Black Africans’
children or descendents. Krog’s work, although not passed from parent to child
(such as Zenzele or To My Children’s Children), nor
presented as reflections from man to his boyhood self (such as Ake’), but it is in a sense an offering
to the ancestors. Krog’s re-telling of the Commission transcripts is in a sense
her own reparation to the Black victims’ ancestors; it is somewhat an
un-silencing on her part of the Black victims silenced and left powerless by
her own ancestors. Essentially, by allowing them expression channeled and
legitimized through her literary exposure and influence, she on behalf of her white ancestors offers a sort of apology in a
way, through her sympathy for and internalization of the Black apartheid
victims’ agonizing accounts of racial prejudice on their own continent at the
hands of European oppressors.
In
conclusion, the African autobiographies featured in this unit can be viewed as
in and of themselves an offering, a
ritual canonization of one’s own experiences, where the “white man’s”
Deified concept of Written Word (more external, its potential reach and influence
due to its method of portability) meets the African gnosis of intuitive,
unwritten nonlinear storytelling (a more enclosed, cryptic, secret, informal
method of communication, and usually limited to family/tribe). In the different
authors’ autobiographical writings, African forms of oral and mythological
storytelling are inherently present, borne from a systematic Eurocentric,
hegemonic oppression of a People who traditionally have been unaware of, or
deliberately forbidden or limited access to, the “white man’s” literary
history. The true triumph, then, is in a sense “beating the white man at his
own game” by taking his assumed literary authority and cleverly circumventing such
by writing distinctively “African” without apology or annotation.
References
Akinkunle,
Olukayode. Unpublished Article A (Writing
Assignment 3, LIT-331-OL009). 2014. Thomas Edison State College
Akinkunle,
Olukayode. Unpublished Article B (Writing
Assignment 5, LIT-33-OL009). 2014. Thomas Edison State College
Carmichael,
Stokley (author); Thelwell, Ekwueme Michael (Contributor-compiler), Ready For Revolution: The Life and Struggles
of Stokley Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Copyright Scribner 1998, New York
Krog,
Antjie. Country of my skull:
Guilt, sorrow, and the limits of forgiveness in the new South Africa. Random
House LLC, 2007, New York
Magona,
Sindiwe. To My Children's Children.
Interlink Books, 2006, Massachusetts
Maraire,
J. Nozipo. Zenzele: A Letter For My
Daughter. Dell Publishing, 1996, New York
Moss,
Laura FE. "" Nice audible crying": Editions, testimonies, and
Country of My Skull." Research
in African Literatures 37.4
(2006): 85-104.
Samuelson,
Meg. "Reading the Maternal Voice in Sindiwe Magona's To My Children's
Children and Mother to Mother." MFS
Modern Fiction Studies 46.1
(2000): 227-245.
Soyinka,
Wole. Ake: The years of
childhood. Random House, 1981, New York
Uncredited.
"An abiku-ogbanje Atlas: a pre-text for rereading Soyinka's Ake and
Morrison's Beloved" The
Free Library 22 December
2002. 21 April 2014 <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/An abiku-ogbanje Atlas: a
pre-text for rereading Soyinka's Ake and...-a097515893>.
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