I may be speaking only for myself, but I found it refreshing to read something that didn't make me want to go home and listen to Morrissey until I fell asleep with tears glistening on my cheeks. Not that Xala fails to engage in serious ideas or confront important issues in African history and culture. It certainly doesn't. But the novel breathes with a vibrancy and knowledge of humanity that, without artifice, that distinguishes it from some of the other things we have been reading.
Of course, the end of the novel justifiably deserves comment. The questions it raises, about liberty, about revolution, about class and justice, are ones that we still grapple with all over the world today. Xala gives us no easy answers; it refuses even to give us recognizable heroes and villains.
This adorable dog's name is Xala. It has nothing to do with the novel Xala.
Apartheid, the forced legal segregation of blacks and whites in South Africa, did not officially and completely end until 1993. The legacy of this cruel system has shaped the cultural and political structures of South African society, and still does, in profound ways.
Segregation was nothing new in the African colonies. Most European colonial governments, either officially or unofficially, promoted the domestic separation of ethnic groups. In South Africa, however, these policies were taken to an extreme not seen elsewhere. They were institutionalized and enforced; the practice became known as apartheid.
Apartheid was one of the most important factors that influenced South Africa to leave the British Commonwealth in 1961 and become a sovereign nation. The Commonwealth did not condone the policies of forced legal segregation, which were supported by most white inhabitants in South Africa. After the formation of South Africa as an independent republic, apartheid was codified into law, becoming broader and encompassing more aspects of everyday life. The capital, Johannesburg, functioned as a "whites only" city, with blacks being unable to stay in the city at night without special permits. Blacks were restricted to "suburbs" such as Soweto, the infamous South African slum, or "homelands:" areas with much fewer resources and utilities than areas occupied by whites. The horrors of apartheid are well-documented, and need not be covered in depth for the purposes of this blog. Here, we are more concerned with how apartheid finally crumbled.
The end of apartheid came about, in large part, because of significant opposition to the South African regime, both from internal foes and a large international movement. A widespread boycott prevented sports teams and entertainers from competing or performing in South Africa.
Walter Rodney was murdered by the C.I.A. He was deemed dangerous enough to America's national interests abroad that he was killed with a bomb disguised as a two-way radio, which was planted by a C.I.A. operative. We can see part of what made people so vehemently opposed to his working class radicalism in the excerpts we read from his 1973 book How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
Rodney is correct to point out that the powers of European colonialism had no vested interest in developing African territories. Educated, empowered, and pragmatic people are less likely to passively submit to exploitation and oppression than fearful, technologically disadvantaged "primitives." However, Walter Rodney was not considered such a threat simply because he supported the rights of dispossessed laborers. The real reason can be discerned from statements such as this:
To complete the moral of the Rockefeller success story, it would be necessary to fill in the details on all the millions of people who had to be exploited in order for one man to become a multi-millionaire. The acquisition of wealth is not due to hard work alone, or the Africans working as slaves in America and the West Indies would have been the wealthiest group in the world. The individualism of the capitalist must be seen against the hard and unrewarded work of the masses.
For the most part, the C.I.A. did not give a shit about Africa, working Africans, starving African children, or African sovereignty. They cared about suppressing and defeating communism. Rodney's "far out" ideas that societies and governments owe a debt to the countless multitude who make possible the tremendous wealth of captains of industry was a shade too "red" for our liking. So somebody blew him up, widowing his wife and leaving his children fatherless. The reason that the C.I.A. is so secretive is because a lot of its history is as shameful as this.
In his essay An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe has such a way of cutting to the essence of a matter that I've decided to refer to him in my mind as "The Katana." For example:
If there is something in these utterances more than youthful inexperience, more than a lack of factual knowledge, what is it? Quite simply it is the desire -- one might indeed say the need -- in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe, as a place of negations at once remote and vaguely familiar, in comparison with which Europe's own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.
TKO! Put this way, the problems inherent in Conrad's approach to Africa and Africans become clear. The Congo that Conrad creates exists to serve his rhetorical objectives, not to present a fair and balanced ethnography. Simply because Conrad opposes the gross mistreatment of the native Africans does not mean that he embraces an egalitarian, progressive view of race relations.
In this context, Heart of Darkness can be seen as one chapter in Europe's internal struggle over morality. Africa itself remained an impenetrable, savage place: the dark counterpart to Europe's luminous civility. Achebe, again:
As I said earlier Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa.
I found this interesting and unsettling link at the New York Times website (registration may be required): Life in Zimbabwe: Wait for Useless Money. Now whenever I see anything about Africa, my brain perks up. Thanks a lot, Allen Webb!
This adorable dog's name is Xala. It has nothing to do with the novel Xala.
