West Africa Reivew (2003)
ISSN: 1094-2254

AFRICAN WRITERS, EXILE, AND THE POLITICS OF A GLOBAL DIASPORA

Tejumola Olaniyan

“Twice Bitten: The Fate of Africa’s Culture Producers,” is the title of a
lecture Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian Writer and Nobel Laureate, delivered at a
gathering of African leaders in 1988. Noting the concern of the gathering for
the epidemic of “brain drain” specialist expertise and cultural workers then
sweeping all over Africa, Soyinka, himself a one-time famous exile, replied
with scorn: “Lucky drainees! The brains of their stay-at-home colleagues will
be found as grisly sediments on the riverbed of the Nile. Or in the stomach
linings of African crocodiles and vultures” (112). This is vintage Soyinka;
the distasteful and stomach-churning imagery was deliberately selected and
served up for the consumption of the distinguished gathering composed, as it
were, of many guilty African leaders or their representatives.

I am particularly interested in Soyinka’s statement as a representative
instance of a peculiar conception of exile commonly expressed by African
writers. In this conception, physical distance from “home” loses its status as
a privileged marker of exile and becomes simply one other feature, perhaps
more obvious than others, of that condition. In other words, physical distance
from home and its commonly associated feelings of being victimized, of
bitterness, sorrow, loneliness, dejection not to say depression, nostalgia,
and the likes, may be painful and distressing, but being at home is often not
any less so. In fact, in Soyinka’s formulation, staying at home may simply be
to live a death. Exile may be anguish and alienation, but home is neither warm
nor welcoming. The Somalian writer, Nuruddin Farah, who has been in exile
since the 1970s and even now has no country as such to return to, understands
this very well and insists that it could even be made profitable. You will
understand then why, at a conference of writers in exile held in Vienna in
December 1987, the title of his presentation was “In Praise of Exile.”
Basically agreeing with Soyinka’s opposition of lucky exiles to dead stay-at-
homes, Farah said he could not have been a writer in Somalia, only a prisoner
(67). Not for him the common idea that the distance of exile kills artistic
creativity: “For me,” he wrote, “distance distills; ideas become clearer and
better worth pursuing” (65).

It should be obvious that these writers are talking about a particular kind of
exile, an involuntary exile catalyzed by fear of certain persecution by the
State. This seems everywhere usually the most talked-about and headline-
grabbing, though it is by no means the only form of permanent or semi-
permanent departure from one’s homeland. When in 1997 the International
Parliament of Writers (PIE), then headed by Wole Soyinka, launched a major
fund-raising campaign, it was to enable it to “set up havens for persecuted
writers” (Reuter, “Writers seek funds for safe haven,” 9/17/97). The idea was
originally Salman’s Rushdie’s, that “cities around the world give shelter to
persecuted writers by helping them obtain residential permits and providing
them with housing and 10,000-franc ($2,000) monthly allowance for a year.”
Only involuntary exile is recognized, and so, for instance, most Caribbean
writers, for whom exile had historically been—and still mostly is—voluntary
even if nevertheless unpleasurable, would be automatically excluded from the
program.

Voluntary or involuntary, it seems to me that what exile inscribes, among
other things, is the limit of the nation-state as we currently have it. Exile,
a kind of opting out or forcing out, reveals incommensurabilities of
interests, hopes and aspiration between individuals and the nation-state,
incommensurabilities that the state always denote as crises because its ruling
idea of the nation is that it is based on a “deep horizontal comradeship,” as
Benedict Anderson would say, of homogenous yearnings. Exile thus puts a
perpetual question mark on the nation-state and its idea by revealing its
jagged edges and bursting seams that cannot be disciplined into conformity. In
fact, the scale and frequency of transnational movements since the 1990s—and
the associated development of discursive articulations of such
transnationalism—have made scholars in many disciples wander aloud if we are
not at the end of an epoch, the Modern Age, whose main agent is the nation-
state along with capitalism, and at the threshold of another, a Global Age,
whose emerging characteristics include a relativization of the nation-state
and consequent souring of nationalist particularism.

This idea is worth exploring a bit. Martin Albrow, a historical sociologist
and one of the leading theorists of the emerging age, argued in his book, The
Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity, that had scholars of the
Modern looked carefully, they could have realized that the age was bound
eventually to hit its limits. Territorial expansion and the sovereignty of
reason, modernity’s intrinsic features, helped to generate ideas of universal
human rights, universal order, universal trade, even of universal government
of liberal democracy (75). If the world was thus unified, it was ironically at
the expense of the main agent of that unification, the modern nation-state,
for these practices and sentiments do little but undermine the authority of
the nation-state. The result has been the increasing “...inability of the
state to shape the aspirations of individuals and to gather them into
collective political aims” (76), the end of an age in which one of its ruling
assumptions was that “state, society and the individual need to exist in an
indissoluble purposive bond and that anything less denotes a crisis” (77).
Albrow’s call for the recognition of the contours of a new age of the Global
is predicated on the increasing significance of global practices and
discourses—human rights, issues of health, women’s rights, ecological
movements, population movements, trade and finance, technology—and the way
they decenter the nation-state in their configuration and operation. Hence he
says that “...in general globalization involves a relativization and
destabilization of old identities, whether of nation-states, communities or
individuals . . . the creation of new hybrid entities, transnational phenomena
like diasporic communities” (93-4).

The global is replacing the bounded nation-state, and if the creation of
diasporic communities is one of the consequences of globalization, then what
was or is exile? Here is where the logic leads us: Diaspora, with its
evocation of large-scale dispersal into a boundless space, is to the age of
the global what exile, with its intimation of alienation from a national
homeland, is to the age of the nation-state. There is a conceptual shift here.
The phrase “Global Diaspora,” though I cannot say that I am sure exactly what
it means, does seem to recognize a world where exile is at such a pace,
frequency and scale as to require redescription as “diaspora.”

But as it is often used today, “diaspora,” unlike “exile,” does not always
invoke or invite immediate enquiries into its causes or origins. This is
perhaps because “diaspora”’s two most common historical referents in the
history of the Jews and the Africans, seem to be all too well-known. A
complacent assumption, surely. Plus, the word is often used in contemporary
immigration studies in a way that effectively subsumes the agony it had
historically carried and implied. For these two reasons, it seems to me that
for African writers who always insist on the immediate causes of their exile
and even point accusing fingers, the idea of a “global age” or “global
diaspora” could not but sound like a dilution of specific local struggles. We
may be at the threshold of the Global Age, they would say, but would that
eradicate national oppression, a major origin of the exile of most African
writers?

Indeed, there are as many origins of the African writer’s exile as there are
writers willing to pronounce on the subject. The “twice bitten” in the title
of Soyinka’s lecture cited at the beginning refers to the bites of
colonialism, and after that neocolonialism. In his formulation, it is the
writer’s task of helping the continent to heal the two wounds that brings the
writer into confrontation with the state and hence the hounding of the writer
into exile. And when Nuruddin Farah suggests another and fundamental layer of
exile to which the African writer is subjected, it is the imperial encounter
that is fingered “...I was born in the oral tradition,” he said, “the move
from oral tradition to a written tradition is itself one form of exile” (63).
The imperial encounter is also located at the heart of another foundational
issue, language, explored by the Kenyan writer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o. I quote him
in substantial detail:

But there is another sense [apart from physical exile], a larger sense, in
which we can talk of exile in African literature. The writers who emerged
after the Second World War were nearly all the products of universities at
home and abroad. Some of these universities like Ibadan in Nigeria, Makerere
in Uganda, Achimota in Ghana had been set up to manufacture an elite that
could make a good partnership with the British ruling circles. The curricula
reflected little or nothing of the local surroundings
….
Writers were part of the educated elite, and there was no way they could
escape these contradictions. For instance, they nearly all opted for European
languages as the means of their creative output. Thus English, French, and
Portuguese became the languages of the new African literature. But these
languages were spoken by only about 5 per cent of the population. The African
Prometheus had been sent to wrest fire from the gods, but instead became a
captive contented with warming himself at the fireside of the gods. Otherwise
he carried the fire in containers that were completely sealed and for which
the majority had no key. For whom were they writing?” (Moving 106-107).
It is not clear how the heralded age of the global will address these issues.
What is the language of that globalization itself? Does a weakening of the
nation-state equal to an unraveling of the hierarchies hitherto in place, both
within the nation and among nations? I don’t see a large thriving community of
Iraqis in Mexico or Cambodia, or Americans and Britons rushing in droves to
catch the next flight to Nigeria or India for want of a better life. Isn’t
globality, like modernity, another way for the West to generalize
its “experience of history as the universal experience of the world” (Ngugi,
Moving 25) while making others pay the bills? What is the social agency
underlying globalization? How can the Ugandan participate in the new age of
the global other than as consumer of American made jeans, sneakers, Michael
Jackson CDs, and yes, notions of human rights, economic deregulation and
liberal democracy—all of which assume an empty, passive, obliging surface for
inscription? (See the revelations of Stiglitz, for instance.) When Rushdie
called for cities around the world to set up safe havens for writers, which
cities does he actually expect to respond to the call? Teheran or New York?

To be sure, the globalist idea of a nation-state unable to embody the
aspirations of its people is one African writers would easily relate to; the
question they would pose is whether globality, which is replacing the pre-
eminence of the nation-state, serves those aspirations. For those who are
familiar with African literature, its uneasy relationship with the African
politics is legendary. To explain the historical antagonism between these two
discourses and practices is none other than to account for the origin of the
exile of African artists and cultural workers.

Independence from colonial rule was barely achieved or years old when powerful
literary representations of systemic schisms between the people and the new
states began to emerge. In other words, while social scientists reveled in the
euphoria of independence, helping the new states to fashion “ten-year
development plans” and other such grandiose “let’s rush to ‘modernize’”
schemes, African writers were busy showing what cakey clay feet the elephants
of uhuru (freedom) have. Peter Abrahams’ . Wreath for Udomo (1956), William
Conton’s The African (1960), Chinua Achebe’s . Man of the People (1966), Wole
Soyinka’s Kongi’s Harvest (1967)....the list is endless. The represented
schisms raise several issues, especially formal and epistemological, about the
nature of the postcolonial State.1 And they are precisely the fundamental
issues the social sciences avoided for decades after independence and only now
discreetly addressing. Such matters include the basic incompatibility between
the dominant imposed and undercolonized nation-state form and its supporting
institutions, and the subordinated but not completely erased precolonial modes
of governance. Hence, argues the literary discourse, the complete lack of
affect, the cardinal ingredient of effective governance between the rulers and
the ruled. A self-feeding circularity has been the result: because of the
state’s lack of legitimacy, there is widespread popular cynicism against it,
and incompetence, graft and corruption at all levels of government; the state,
without any moral force, cannot mobilize the people except through violence, a
situation that further alienates the state from the people. I think Patrick
Chabal, the Africanist political scientist, should have included non-African
scholars of Africa too when he argued, correctly, that African writers “did
more to reveal the reality of postcolonial Africa than most African scholars”
(8).

The problematic the literature articulated is this: Africans compulsorily
living a modernity they have contributed overwhelmingly to but do not chart
and can merely-only-futilely try to modify and domesticate. African literature
became such a perspicacious watcher of African politics that it would have
been a miracle for both of them to get along in harmony. It is not surprising
then that one of the peculiarly postcolonial literary forms is the “writers’
prison diary,” accounts by writers of their imprisonment and often torture by
the state. For if the writers were, as I argued, one of the earliest
professional / social groups to doubt the new state, they were also,
expectedly, among the first of such to encounter its jail or forced exile.

So, if the problems of the African artist are thus specific—linguistic
colonialism, national exploitation, imposition of alien political systems and
institutions, etc—and those problems implicate the same forces that are now
said to define a new global age, what would be globalism and a global diaspora
to them, even when they participate in it? When Soyinka unceremoniously
escaped—Rambo-style, he likes to say—from Abacha’s Nigeria a few years ago, he
probably got a red-carpet welcome in France, Britain and the United States,
and I am sure he was grateful. But I am sure that (1) the irony was not lost
on him about the historical culpability of these countries in the formation of
the peculiar nature of the Nigerian state, and (2) that the real joy for him
would be to be in a position to return the welcome by playing host to a
Western writer in similar circumstance, or better still, that no one globally
should be forced to leave his or her home in that way, so that no one should
have to be the ever-welcoming host. Globality and the global diaspora seem to
be an unequal and one-way traffic. I have pushed my exploration this way
because of my suspicion that the ideas of a global age and a global diaspora,
attracted to them as I am, may not be globally shared, and that my attraction
to them is simply due to my location in a “metropole” where the intensity of
both legal and illegal immigration have contributed to a sense of the US as
not a “nation” as such but a land of many diasporas. At instances such as
this, I am reminded of the warning by Rey Chow in her book, Writing Diaspora:
Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies, that “third world”
intellectuals in the metropole guard against the “lure of diaspora,” that is,
the tendency to forget the difference between one’s experience as a diasporic
intellectual and that of those “stuck at home” (118). Her words, “stuck at
home,” are sobering enough.

References
Albrow, Martin. The Global Age: State and Society Beyond Modernity. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1997.

Appadurai, Arjun, ed. Globalization. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Chabal, Patrick. Power in Africa: An Essay in Political Interpretation. New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992

Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural
Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.

Glad, John. Ed. Literature in Exile. Durham: Duke UP, 1990.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms.
London: James Currey, 1993.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature. London: James Currey, 1986.

Sheffer, Gabriel. Ed. Modern Diasporas in International Politics. London:
Croom helm, 1986.

Soyinka, Wole. “Twice Bitten: The Fate of Africa’s Culture Producers.” PMLA
105.1 (Jan. 1990): 110-120.

Stiglitz, Joseph E. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: W. W. Norton,
2002.

Endnotes
1. This peculiar nature has produced such literary “genres” as “dictatorship
literature,” “guerilla poetry,” “theatre for development,” “writers’ prison
diary,” and so on. In the other arts, there are categories such as “engaged
cartooning” and “rebel music.”


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