The Search for an Ideal Society in the African Novel

Abstract

The subject treated in this dissertation is about Ayi Kwei Armpah and Ngugi wa Thiong‘o as novelists writing in order to raiuse the consciousness of their respective societies or nations in relation to what went wrong and has generated the present anomy as far as the socio-political and economic conditions are concerned. The latter is characterised by oppression at the political level and the disintegration of the tradtional African societal organisation which used to emphasise the common good. This social organisation has been shaped now after the modern trend of individualism and the Western commodity culture. Armah and Ngugi begin first by depicting the status quo in Ghana and Kenya respectively ; in their respective endeavours, they express their dissociation from this very status quo to project a vision, stemming from their ideologies, of an ideal society whereby the mode of conduct would be to contribute to the common well-being. Thier ideologies are a synthesis of their traditional thought (the Akan in the case of Armah and the Gikuyu in the case of Ngugi) and the Western world view, though Armah quite singularly, tends to deny any Western value that would influence positively his society. Armah’s ideology of the ‘way,’or reciprocity, could be considered as the oppositional voice to Western hegemony. He claims it to be superior to the Western view or the ‘gleam’ as he calls it in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Ngugi’s ideology for its part combines traditional culture that clings to land and the Western philosophy of Marxism which, contrary to Armah’s belief, can share a common ground with the African communalistic spirit. At the narrative level, Armah and Ngugi’s narratives, because of their version of the novel genre that straddles the oral as well as the print tradition of storytelling, are meant to seek, following Fredric Jameson’s demonstration in his The Political Unconscious, resolutions of a contradiction of the social organisation in Africa. Thier narratives resist, yet at the same time benefit from the Western form of storytelling. This also reflects the writers’ resistance of the nation-state political form and yet, because of its Janus-face, accepting it and defining their nations in accordance with. Also, following Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, the writers ideologies are, like utopias, incongruent with the status quo. Thus they constitute an ideal that is meant to be approximated because they embody the form of society wished for. Although Armah’s depiction of the status quo in his first three novels The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Fragments and Why Are We So Blest ? give the impression of disillusionment, they incorporate an attempt at explaining and analysing the African situation and the African psyche. Both at the narrative and the ideological levels, in Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, Armah seems to be engaged in the rendition of the primal wisdom in his society and the creation of new values, a new perspective incorporated in his ideology of the ‘way.’ Ngugi adopts a similar approach in his later novels Petals of Blood and Devil on the Cross, by depicting the unsatisfying situation in Kenya and analysing at the same time the underlying causes that led to it. Meanwhile adopting his society’s traditional culture (shedding light especially on the resistance movement) and Marxism as an ideology, he sketches characters who are involved in raising the consciousness of their fellow citizens about the ideals of a communalistic self-contained Kenyan nation.