The African Symposium: An online journal of the African Educational Research Network
THE BLACK MAN’S ORDEALS: A POST-COLONIAL READING OF KOFI ANYIDOHO’S
ANCESTRALLOGIC & CARIBBEANBLUES
Gabriel Sunday Bamgbose
Tai Solarin University of Education
Abstract
Black writing has always been engaged with the historical circumstances that condition the
consciousness of the black race. Attempts have always been made to explore the dimensions of these
historical circumstances in post-colonial studies often with focus on prose fictional and dramatic
genres, but not much effort has been made to explicate this representation of history of loss and
trauma within the purview of post-colonial orientation in modern African poetry. This paper,
therefore, is a critical post-colonial treatment of the engagement of Kofi Anyidoho’s poetic
imagination with issues of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism in the black man’s history. This
is in an attempt to examine how Anyidoho has given voice to the silent but not silenced history of
slavery and by extension, history of colonialism and disillusionment of neo-colonial world order.
The paper adopts the counter-discursive and the autocritical paradigms of post-colonial theory,
which accounts, through the fusion of cultural and literary criticism, for processes through which
the postcolony responds to the issue of colonialism and its aftermath, and the present realities of the
neo-colonialism and its diverse implications. For the purpose of this study, Anyidoho’s
AncestralLogic & CaribbeanBlues is subjected to literary and critical analysis to examine the poet’s
chronicle of the black people’s traumatic experiences of the Middle Passage, colonial encounter, and
neo-colonial hopelessness. The text journeys through the nervous conditions of the post-colony. The
poet versifies the painful and dehumanizing history of slavery, which causes Africans to loss their
lives and identity. The grim experiences of the black slaves on the Caribbean sugarcane fields run
through the “blues”. Colonialism also does its best to exploit the people of black descent materially
and immaterially. Even when the colonial masters leave the leadership of Africa to Africans after
colonialism, the black leaders further the colonial exploitation and imperialism in new ways and
betray their fellow blacks. Irrespective of the complexity of the black man’s ordeal, the poet
expresses hope and revolutionary vision. The poems are artistic “logic” that reconciles the black
people’s past with their present in order to project the future of the black race. Modern African
poetry maintains an intricate tie between text and context because there is a strong link between
African letters and African life. Like other African writers, Anyidoho in his poetry displays social,
political and historical commitment to his black race.
Key words: Black race, Post-colonial, Slavery, Colonialism, Neo-colonialism
Introduction
The history of the black man’s race is smeared with many ordeals. The race has been a victim
of slavery, colonialism with its imperialistic and exploitative tendencies, racial segregation and color
bars, and the final blow that leaves this race in coma is the advent of neo-colonialism, which Ngugi wa
Thiong’o simplistically describes as an advanced stage of imperialism (1982:5). All these come to bear
on the black man just because he is ‘black’ and his being black accords him the status of a sub-human
exposable to dehumanization. These ordeals mark the unique experiences and realities of the black
man’s world and in fact his identity. It is within the consciousness of these ordeals that Kofi Anyidoho
weaves his poetry. Romanus Egudu (1978:2) has contended that “The artist is a member of society,
and the content and style of his [or her] work are affected by social reality.” The poetry of Anyidoho,
like other African writers, shows deep concern for the social realities that characterize the postcolony.
This suggests that the treatment of the text cannot be removed from the context that produces it. This
makes poetry in Africa highly “utilitarian” (Tanure Ojaide, 1995:4).
The purpose of this study is to investigate the post-colonial condition of Africa within the
broad context of the history of the black race as treated by Anyidoho in his collection of poetry,
AncestralLogic & CaribbeanBlues (1993). The text is considered relevant for this study because it
artistically spins the web of the black man’s history and experience from the past to the present. The
collection, in Anyidoho’s words, is “the forever journey into SoulTime…It is the quest for a future alive
with the energy of recovered vision, a future released from the trauma of a cyclonic past and from the
myopia of a stampeded present” (xii).
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It is observed that this collection has not attracted much critical attention as others authored
by Anyidoho despite the fact that the poet’s “quest for recovered vision” (xii) boldly confronts the
cause of the black world’s (especially Africa) predicament by tracing its “history of pain and of endless
fragmentation” (xi). Oyeniyi Okunoye in “Pan-Africanism and Globalized Black Identity in the Poetry
of Kofi Anyidoho and Kwadwo Opokwu-Agyemang” (2009) examines how Anyidoho’s artistic vision
“advocates the linking up of various segments of the black world as a necessary act of collective
definition of Africans peoples in their various locations [which] cannot be divorced from their
histories” (77). To him, the poet attempts to reconstruct the identity of the black race, which is an
effort targeted at imaginatively linking up the “various black diasporic communities with the
homeland” (65). Reading the collection from the perspective of Pan-Africanist consciousness,
Okunoye claims that it presents the poet’s “dream of an integrated global African community” (73).
However, this paper critically explores issues of slavery, colonialism, and neo-colonialism in
the text in order to revisit and rethink the violent and traumatic realities that mark the black identity.
This study analyses the black man’s ordeals as represented in the text within the framework of postcolonial theory. Post-colonial literary theory deals the writings of the margin, paying attention to how
literary and cultural elements are manipulated in order to subvert the hegemonic structures of
colonialism and neo-colonialism. This accounts for the suitability of the theory since it addresses the
post-colonial condition of the black/African world, which forms the preoccupation of the poet.
Okunoye (2008) makes a strong case for the exploration of the possibilities of post-colonial theorizing
in the reading of modern African poetry. As opposed to other genres of African literature – prose
fiction and drama – “much of African poetry remains un-theorised in basic postcolonial terms”
(Okunoye, 76). This makes this study significant as it contributes to the body of discourse exploring
the possibilities of the adoption of post-colonial theory to the study of modern African poetry.
Okunoye maps out the pattern of post-colonial criticism of modern African poetry by identifying four
major orientations of its post-colonial essence:
It considers as postcolonial works that dramatise the corrupting influence of the colonial
engagement on the African; works that project a conscious resistance to the colonial presence
by subverting imperialist distortions in the perception of Africa and Africans and works that
excavate pre-contact indigenous literary practices in order to assert cultural identity,
accounting in the process, for the prevalence of specific forms of postcolonial consciousness
within particular poetic traditions in Africa (77).
The notion that the counter-discursive or the writing back paradigm is “probably the most
applicable to the creative vision underlying the production” (77) of much of African poetry holds sway
in Okunoye’s study, even though he acknowledges this as the first stage in the appraisal of postcolonial orientation in modern African poetry. However, this study engages the counter-discursive
and autocritical paradigms of post-colonialism in the explication of the artistic vision of Anyidoho in
his collection, AncestralLogic & CaribbeanBlues.
This study adopts the tool of literary and critical analysis in order to examine the “counterdiscursive strategies” (Helen Tiffin, 1995:96) deployed in the text, which is crucial to the practice of
post-colonial discourse. It considers how the poet engages his poetic imagination in questioning the
hegemony of the West. Here, attention is paid to the “silent, but not silenced” poetics of slavery and
colonialism that the poet versifies in his quest “to speak to the history” which brings “dis/order to
national and communal milieu” (Georgia Axiotou, 2008: ix) of the Negro. Moreover, this study does
what Kehinde (6) calls a post-colonial “autocritique” of the “neo-colonial stage of imperialism” (Ngugi,
1982:5) in the black/African world order as treated in the text. At this point, the discussion of the
poetry shifts its focus to the neo/post-colonial ordeals.
Post-Colonial Theory
Post-colonial theory is a body of discourse that responds to colonialism and its aftermath in
the Empire. It is a form of race and ethnicity-bound discourse, which counters the ‘centre’ in order to
give the ‘margin’ its own true voice and identity in the imperial order of things. In the words of
Okunoye (2008:79), “The fusion of cultural and literary criticism is most evident in postcolonial
discourse.” It is a body of thinking that interrogates Western hegemony through the examination of
literary and cultural productions. ‘Identity’, which is defined by race and ethnicity, is central to postcolonial discourse. Donald Hall loosely defines the term ‘race’ as a form of cultural identity based on
physiological attributes. It “indicate[s] practically any group of people who self-identify separately
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from others” (2001:264). Race, Hall submits, refers to the “ways that physiological characteristics
(such as skin tone) are combined with distinctions in social history (such as region of original
habitation) to distinguish and identify groups of people” (2001:265-266). The term ‘ethnicity’, on the
other hand, refers to the form of cultural identity often based on non-physiological attributes such as
nation of origin, “religious affiliation and/or shared customs or language” (Hall, 2001:266).
The definition of ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ as forms of cultural identity suggests the major
engagement of post-colonial theory as a medium of “challenging oppression based on cultural
identity” by focusing “directly on national and regional legacies of imperialism and colonialism” in
order to “enrich our understanding of the diverse experiences and rich heritages of all groups and
peoples’’ (Hall, 2001:266). Post-colonial theory is an amorphous and heterogeneous field of enquiry,
which focuses on “colonial and neo-colonial oppression, on resistance to colonialism, on the
respective identities of colonizer and colonized, on the patterns of interaction between those
identities, on postcolonial migration to the metropolis, on the ensuing hybridity of culture and so on”
(Hans Bertens, 2001:202).
Post-colonial theory develops out of colonial and neo-colonial experiences in the worlds that
have witnessed oppression in its old state and are still going through its hurdles in its new form.
Hence, Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and Peter Brooker (2005:219) simply describe postcolonialism as a form of discourse that “seek[s] to undermine the imperialist subject.”
Post-colonial theory, in its foremost dimension, is a response to Western hegemony and an
attempt to subvert the notion of Western superiority over the so-called ‘third world’ inferiority. Mary
Klages (2006:147) states that the field of post-colonialism:
examines the effect that colonialism has had on the development of literature and literary
studies - on the novels, poems, and ‘English’ departments within the context of the history
and politics of regions under the influence, but outside the geographical boundaries of
England and Britain.
The development of post-colonial studies started with the development of colonialism. The
analysis “of the cultural dimension of colonialism/imperialism,” Selden and Widdowson (1993:188)
claim, “is as old as the struggle against it.” In Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin’s
(1995:1) perspective:
Post-colonial literatures are as a result of this interaction between imperial culture and the
complex of indigenous cultural practices. As a consequence, post-colonial theory has existed for a long
time before the particular name was used to describe it. Once colonized people had cause to reflect on
and express the tension which ensued them from these problematic and contest, but eventually
vibrant and powerful mixture of imperial language and local experience, post-colonial theory came
into being.
Post-colonial discourse has always been a reaction to imperialism even before its conscious
formulation as a theoretical field of study. It is an ontological and epistemological body of principles
set to question the notion of Western domination and the ‘being’ of the ‘centre’ (the dominating) and
the ‘margin’ (the dominated). Hence, post-colonial theory is a “counter-hegemonic discourse’’ in
which “the empire writes back to the centre’’, in the words of Rusdie Salman, (qtd in Ashcroft,
Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989:ix), to dismantle the Western notion of superiority and assert their identity.
Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989), submit that post-colonial theory deals with issues as:
migration, slavery, suppression, resistance, representation, difference, race, gender, place,
and responses to the influential master discourses of imperial Europe such as history,
philosophy and linguistics, and the fundamental experiences of speaking and writing b which
all these come into being. None of these is ‘essentially’ post-colonial, but together they form
the complex fabric of the field (2).
This suggests that the basic thrust of post-colonial theory is the “literary and cultural
decolonization’’ of the Empire, which is a process that involves “a radical dismantling of the European
codes and a post-colonial subversion and appropriation of the dominant European discourses’’
(Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989:195). The theoretical arguments in post-colonial theory, Selden,
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Widdowson and Brooker note, are influenced by theories of ideology, Derrida’s deconstruction
method, Bakhtin’s dialogics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, Lyotard’s postmodern critique and Foucault’s
theories of power and knowledge.
Post-colonial theory questions Western dominance of knowledge and power. It seeks to
reread and rewrite the European historical and fictional record for the purpose of decolonizing the
Empire. According to Tiffin (1995:95-96), this decolonization is a process that:
invokes an ongoing dialectic between hegemonic centrist system and peripheral subversion of
them; between European or British discourses and their post colonial dismantling…. Post–
colonial literature/cultures are thus constituted in counter–discursive rather than
homologous practices, and the other ‘fields’…of counter-discursive strategies of the dominant
discourse.
Post-colonial theory queries the assumption of universalism through which the West
maintains its hegemony, and it maintains the ‘alterity’ or otherness of the margin through ‘hybridity’,
which Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin (1989:78) consider as “the source of literary and cultural
redefinition.” These are the underlying principles of post-colonial discourse.
In the present dispensation in post-colonial discourse, there is a shift from “the history of
colonialism to the analysis of the postcolonial world order” (Kehinde, 6). Citing Ania Loomba
(1998:256), Kehinde notes that post-colonialism, in its autocritical sense, has shifted “towards
expansion of neo-colonial imbalances in the contemporary world order” (6). In the words of Oyegoke
(2006:289), neo-colonialism is a form of “new hegemony”. Ngugi wa Thiong’o (1986:4) maintains
that imperialism has continued to “control the economy, politics, and cultures” of the margin even
after colonialism. After the decentring of the ‘old centre’, a new centre originates within the ‘old
margin’ and furthers the exploitation and imperialism of the ‘old centre’. It should be noted that this
new centre is in communion with the old centre, and this makes the oppressive burden heavier on the
‘new margin’. Post-colonial critics deconstruct and subvert this new order of imperialism in their
writing.
From the foregoing, it is obvious that post-colonial discourse is a product of connected history
of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism that shapes the being and existence of the subaltern.
According to Ayo Kehinde, the term ‘post-colonial’:
has at least two meanings inherent in it as reflected in the essays (in Postcolonial Lamp). In
the first instance, it connotes the time or literature after colonialism. Secondly, it connotes the
tug-of-war between the memories of the colonial past and the utopian dream of the
postcolonial future that is held in the uneasy present of postcolonialism (2008:6).
Post-colonial discourse explores issues of decolonization or the political and cultural
independence of a people formerly subjected to colonial rule, on the one hand, and the socio-political
realities/experiences of these people under the leadership of their own people after the colonial era,
on the other hand. Post-colonialism possesses a bi-partite nature. First, it is an intellectual movement
that attempts to correct the stereotypical assumptions foisted on the colonized by their colonial
masters during the era of colonization; second, it is a reflection of the realities that independence
brought about in the Empire.
A Post-Colonial Critique of Kofi Anyidoho’s Ancestrallogic & Caribbeanblues
Kofi Anyidoho is a Ghanaian poet. He has taught at Western University and Cornell
University; he now teaches at the University of Ghana, Legon. His poetic imagination is influenced by
the oral Ewe poetry. In AncestralLogic & CaribbeanBlues (1993), Anyidoho embarks on an odyssey
through the history of the black race from the past to the present. The collection presents the logic of
black man’s ordeals through the web of history. The poet chronicles the wandering of the blacks
“through history and memory, seeking lost landmarks, often proceeding with an intuitive logic
marked by a geography of scars and by the inescapable living wound under a patchwork of scars”
(Anyidoho, xiii. Emphasis is added). Since the poems give expression to the traumatic experiences
that characterize the life the black people, the ‘blues’: spoke of some sadness, pain, or
deprivation…The melancholy tone of the lyrics, however, is not only world-weary but also world-wise.
The blues expound the hard-won wisdom of bitter life experience. They frequently create their special
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mood through down-to-earth, even gritty, imagery drawn from everyday life (X. J. Kennedy & Dana
Gioia, 2007:549).
“The Taino in 1992” (3-5), recalls the “turbulent memory of the Taino”, a Caribbean “Lost Land” (3).
The ugly history of slavery and the inhumane activities of Christopher Colomb, who they say
‘discovered’ the land, are captured here:
So they wiped them out
Drowned their screams
Burned their nerves and bones
And scattered their ashes
Across the intimidating splendor
Of this young history of lies (3).
This point in time in history is described as the “StormTime”, when “Hurricanes”, the symbol
of violence brought by Colomb sweeps the natives of Taino “through the infinity of centuries / forever
lost to trauma and to amnesia” (5). The violence of slavery wipes off the natives of the land.
Christopher Colomb is violence-personified; hence the repetition of his name and its contrast with the
images of “Hurricane”, “Sea of Blood” and “Oceans of Blood”.
In “San Pedro de Macoris” (6-7), the gory picture of the experience of the “Haitian
immigrants” in the “Canefields”/ “the sugarfields” is captured in grim images, which match the
dehumanizing experience of slavery. The poet presents the sad history of the Haitians as they “shuttle
through life” in “infinite sadness” on plantations “In the uncertain Dance of Zombi,” where they
“poured out” their lives “Upon the sugarfields.” The poet, in a tone that carries the gravity of intense
sorrow, says that “the Haitian Batey / Is a Living Wound / In the throat of the Sugarmill.” The
dehumanizing experience, the poet notes in “Republica Dominicana” (8-11):
…undresses your skin
peels your veins
and dilutes your blood.
dispossessed of your ancestory
your BlackNess
Dissolve into vague regions
of the indios myth (8).
The Negroes lost their ancestral heritage, their identity and are displaced. That is why they
“are mislabeled Indios” (Anyidoho, xiii). The history of the black race is:
Full of discrepances and disjointed limbs.
pitiless and venomous
image
of history’s distortures
of our furious race (11).
The message and the form of the lines match aptly to reflect the black race’s dismemberment.
The images of “Death & Life” (cast in a parallelistic mode) “in the still center of RagingStorms”,
“nightmares”, “mask of agony” and a “Tarantula” crawling “in the dark” into the persona’s “daydream”
build up to create an eerie effect on the reader. All these are devices meant to show the magnitude of
the history of slavery and the Middle Passage with its attendant “Atlantic’s turbulent waves” and its
adverse effect on the black man’s psyche.
“Earthchild” shifts its perspective mainly to the memory of colonialism and how it erodes the
traditions of the black man (Africans specifically): “Termites came and ate away our voice / ate away
our rainbow’s gown of flames / soiled memories with wild banquets of blood” (19). The poet captures
the “soul” of the Negroes’ “song” in order to depict the essence of African and Caribbean spirit. The
repetition of the “cross rhythms of Jazz”, the “polyrhythmic miles of Jazz" “the rumbling weight of
drums”, and the “wails of saxophones” foreground the essence of “song” and “voice” in the ancestral
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heritage of the black. This heritage, as a result of colonization is lost but it is found again. The poem’s
tone is that of mixed feelings of fear and hope. There is the fear that the ancestral heritage may be lost
“again to pampered dreams of mythmakers… [and] to imperial dreams of history’s pawnbrokers” (21).
Yet, the alternated refrains are imbued with hope:
And still we stand among the cannonades
We smell of mist and powdered memories…
And those who took away our voice
Are now surprised
They couldn’t take away our song (23).
The poem is a mockery of colonialism and its attendant ordeals.
The other parts of the collection shift in perspective from the general experience of the black
race’s history to the African colonial and neo-colonial experiences. “Children of the Land” (32-41)
captures the African landscapes - the Northern, Southern, West, Central and East African landscapes and their peculiar features. “Redeemers” (82-83) relates the activities of the colonizers aided by the
white missionaries, who condemn African cultures and religion and “persuade us all / against our very
selves.” This is done to uphold the Western hegemony and relegate the “other” to the marginal
position:
They came with a Bouquet of CobWebs
Sang obscene songs
Over our sacred images of Self and Gods
Their huge nostrils still clogged
With dust and steamy breath.
In their hands a kind offer of Holy Death (83).
They offer their religion and culture to kill Africans’, “but our human flesh suck to our bones /
and noble passions still move us on / even among our many blunders” (83). There is the hope that
Africans have not lost of all their “self” to colonialism. In “Santriofi”, the poet pays attention to the
neo-colonial violence:
But once too often we’ve held
our doubts and found unspeakable
terror in silence and patience
when marvelous blockheads
took up megaphones and broke
eardrums with philosophical obscurities
and baboons in mufti and native sandals
made menacing speeches from platform (71).
The natives, who take over leadership after the colonial era, betray their fellow countrymen
and turn politics to a game of exploitation and power abuse. They are fortified with propaganda. They
are “halfwits & gifted inventors / of designers deaths in man-made seasons of drought” (74). Soon
disappointment and disillusionment set in. This menace of neo-colonial imperialism informs the
revolutionary vision of the poet. In “Bayonets”, the poet contends that “Rivulets of venom shall water
our fields / Restoring this soil to ancestral Fertile Time” (77).
Kofi Anyidoho’s poems, as it has been noted by Jawa Apronti (1979:41), are those “of the
speaking voice…he reveals a tendency to the elegiac…the theme of death and destruction is pervasive;
the mood is predominantly gloomy, the tone somber.” The stylistics of the poems is characterized by
constant and unusual use of capitalization and unusual fusion of lexical items. His experimental use of
language, which is manifested in his mixture codes and his engagement of historical allusions, gives
his poetry its uniqueness.
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Conclusion
This critical analysis is done in order to weigh how committed and utilitarian the poet’s work
is. It is a logical and analytical endeavour that attempts to justify the poet’s artistic vision of recovery
in his “journey…into our past in order to come to terms with our future” (xi). From the analysis, it is
crystal clear that slavery and colonialism have not lost their grip from the black man’s neck; they
simply continue their stifling and strangling duties since the slave and colonial masters have not given
up their preoccupations. They have only, borrowing the words of D. H. Lawrence, changed guards,
with the white imperialists being replaced by the black imperialists. This makes the black man’s
ordeals a very complicated one. Perhaps, the complexity of Anyidoho’ subject in this collection
informs the complexity of his style. His use of unusual compounding and capitalization of words is an
intellectual attempt to subvert the linguistic code of the centre for the purpose of maintaining a radical
difference. His use of the metaphor of Santrofi Amona, the dilemma bird of Akan mythology (61), as a
cultural code that represents the important role of the artist in the society, also attests to the fact that
the poet strives to redeem the image of Africans and reassure their identity. The poet gracefully
maintains a striking balance between the complexity of his subject and style. The weaving of
Anyidoho’s poetry shows that there is no clear cut distinction between text and context in black
writing. The poems connect African letters with black socio-economic, political and historical
consciousness. Thus, it is a form of poetry bent, borrowing the words of Chinua Achebe (1975:62), to
bear the burden of African experiences and realities from the past to the present.
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Author Information
Bamgbose, Gabriel Sunday
Department of English, College of Humanities
Tai Solarin University of Education
P.M.B 2118, Ijagun, Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, Nigeria
Tel: +2348038615161
Email: [email protected]
41 Volume 13, No. 1, June 2013
The African Symposium (ISSN# 2326-8077)