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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 23-28 Intercolonialism and In the twilight of late Hellenism, large slave owning estates were divided by the owners into small plots, which were leased to peasants and slaves who now became half free labourers, paying the proprietors a large proportion of their produce. These were the coloni, new economic agents produced by the slow collapse of the slave society. I refer to this at the outset to remind us of the material and conceptual origin of our concern here. The relation between proprietor and colonatus was fraught with difficulty from the outset, though apparently it was a clear enough arrangement. The owner/proprietor commands some resources, and the colonatus commands others. But the process of colonization traversed history in the context of capital. And that led not only to a hierarchism of resources, but also to the augmented ability of the colonizer. The owner/proprietor was able, through the market, to acquire the resources that he did not possess. Thus all resources, including labour, could be theoretically and practically acquired and therefore controlled by the colonizer/capitalist. This led to an ambiguity, a complexity in the status and the relation between the different forces of production as well as the relation between the colonizer and the “other” who now, at the mercy of the colonizer, could only be called the colonized – he could no longer be seen as an equal participant in the process of production, for the resource that he owned could also be commanded by the colonizer through the economy of waged labour. Thinking about Intercolonialisms requires this background, for it enables us to clearly see the origins of the power differentials that operate for colonialism itself to work. The different alignments and the varied operations of these differentials will lead to differences in the nature of colonialism – and from this basis, it is possible to compare colonial practices and the resulting cultures. There is also, of course the differences arising from the specific history and geography of the colonized area itself – the existing cultures and practices in these areas, in conjunction with the different colonial policy of the colonizing powers, must be the focus of concern if we are to understand colonial discourses and their operations in specific locations. To elucidate – the English [end page 23] colonization of India might be seen as the operation of a homogenous discourse across the length and breadth of India, but in fact the influence of the English did not penetrate equally throughout India at all. The idea of a centralized colonial state was not in place at the inception of the English encounter, but grew with the necessity to bring larger areas under single administrative control – in each case, the colonial state spread its tentacles gradually in response to resistance, or because it felt the need to control areas outside its direct purview. However, if we compare the experience of India with that of other English colonies, the process might appear both similar in some instances and different in others. For example, in Kenya, an area in the Rift Valley known as the White Highlands was deemed fit for British settlers. The local Gikuyu farmers were dispossessed of their land and white settlers established extensive farms on which the Gikuyu, original owners of the land, were forced to become squatters. The Crown Lands Ordinance decreed that this land belonged to the crown of England – since the local Gikuyu had no concept of landownership and still less of documents to prove this ownership; the land which they had owned by virtue of having worked it for hundreds of years became the property of the English crown, and they were designated as illegal occupants. The anti-colonial struggle in Kenya was thus a focused struggle for Land and Freedom. The guerillas we know as the Mau Mau were actually members of the Land and Freedom Army, and the armed struggle that they waged was against economic as well as cultural dispossession. In fact, all anti-colonial struggles that originated from leftist ideology, like those waged in Guinea Bissau or in Angola, were based on the premise that colonialism was first and foremost an economic phenomenon that sought to consolidate itself through cultural dominance. The latter was designed to justify or legitimize the former, both for the colonized and the colonizer’s own conscience and the uncomfortable questions raised in the “civilized” colonizing country about depriving the colonized. But the colonizers did not fail to learn from their experiences in their myriad encounters with different peoples and cultures in different lands. The “experience of India” apparently provided some lessons – in Nigeria at least, this was evident to colonizers and colonized. As Charles Buxton[1] points out, The educated Indian – the babu was regarded with precisely the same mixture of contempt and jocularity as the educated African today. Yet what has happened? In less than half a century those babus have become the statesmen of India. They were a minority, [end page 24] but without their consent and cooperation, we could not carry out the administration at all. However this did not mean, of course, that Indian experience duplicated the Nigerian. An obvious way to understand this is to look at texts in English from both cultures: the difference between say Amos Tutuola and R.K. Narayan, both “pioneers” of Non-British English writing, is illustrative of this difference. In fact, one might take this comparison further to understand inter-colonial difference. Tutuola was certainly a first generation English writer in Nigeria, while Narayan was preceded by a number of other Indians who wrote in English, stretching back to the end of the 19th century. Clearly, Narayan was writing within a tradition that had begun to form itself, even if he was considered one of the pioneers by later critics. Tutuola, however, had no English tradition to fall back upon: in the middle of the 20th century, he began to write in the colonizer’s language before Nigeria gained independence. His work functions thematically within a local tradition of orature, and its language is the language of the chap-books that flooded the Onitsha market in Igboland in Eastern Nigeria, a language that could be identified as English, but was creatively accommodated to suit the needs of the nesting culture from which the themes were drawn. Not even Nigerians living in England, and no doubt obsessed with Queen’s English, as Achebe tells us,[2] were willing to grant that Tutuola had written in English or done anything of any remote significance in the realm of English or Nigerian literature. This perhaps illustrates my point about the existing local conditions in a colony, which interact with the policy of the colonizers in order to produce the cultural discourse of the colonized country. In India, with its long scriptal tradition, literacy was a marker of class even before the advent of the English. When the colonizers used their language to create a class of “native” administrators, this distinction between the literate and the non-literate was further politicized and became a source of power. The existing structures of difference were articulated into the structure introduced by the colonial state. In Nigeria, however, this was not the case. Apart from the fact that the very identity of the geopolitical area we now know as Nigeria was the creation of British administrative convenience, the nationalities that inhabited the Eastern part of what was then the West African Protectorate were non-script societies. There was no internal power structure based on either language or literacy in that language, similar to the condition that the British had found and used in India. The lack of a script tradition forms the crucial difference between not only Tutuola and Narayan, but even between Achebe or Soyinka or another Nigerian writer of the first generation and their Indian contemporaries writing in English. The history of colonization in India was longer: for a start, English had that much longer to [end page 25] penetrate the lives of a section of the colonized and settle there. This section was, as we have already seen, a privileged and literate class. Their distance from the oral cultures that existed in India at the time of the British colonization, and even after the English had left, was much greater than that of the Nigerian writers who belonged to non-script societies and for whom the Roman script was just a way of writing what they were close to in daily life. D.O. Fagunwa’s Forest of a Thousand Daemons, translated into English by Soyinka, was written in Yoruba, but since Yoruba had no script, Fagunwa used the Roman script. Since Tutuola had an English script, he used it, but what he wanted to write had little or nothing to do with the culture – the world that the English script and the English language itself grew out of – so he used the language as one would use a piece of clay and molded it to suit what he was saying, rather than the other way round. Achebe has clearly stated his view of English as a medium of African literature: My quarrel with the English language has been that the language reflected none of my experience. But now I began to see the matter in quite another way. Perhaps the language was not my own because I had never attempted to use it, had only learnt to imitate it. If this were so then it might be made to bear the burden of my experience if I could find the stamina to challenge it.[3] But this view is different again from Ngugi’s – and the reason for this is that the colonial policy espoused by the same colonizer, viz. the English, in Kenya, and that espoused by them in Nigeria were different, because Kenya was a settler colony and Nigeria was not. The issue of land, therefore, proved strongly persuasive in Kenya, and it was linked directly to economic deprivation; whereas in Nigeria, the struggle was more for citizenship rights, freedom and democracy, as abstract “modern” concepts that, paradoxically, were learnt by the nationalist leaders in the hallowed portals of the colonizer’s educational institutions in the colonizer’s country itself. The reference to the babus of India, and their counterparts in Nigeria is enough to indicate the nature of the anti-colonial struggle in both India and Nigeria. There were no babus or their equivalents in Kenya. However, the struggle was spearheaded by English educated leaders like Dedan Kimathi and J.M. Karuiki, but the Mau Mau guerillas were peasants, fighting for their very livelihood, not for what Ngugi, in the Trial of Dedan Kimathi, calls “flag independence.” Little wonder then that Ngugi’s position on English as a language for African literature is different from Achebe’s. It is out of the history of colonization and of the anti-colonial struggle peculiar to Kenya that Ngugi proposed the abolition of the English Departments.[4] [end page 26] The strength of comparative methodology lies precisely in being able to understand these realities by looking at texts produced in different colonized/colonizing conditions simultaneously and investigating their operations in those texts. Thus it becomes possible not only to think of Colonialisms both synchronically and diachronically, but also to put the very idea of Intercolonialisms onto our agenda. In fact, one could even extend this to Intra-colonialisms: did those areas that came in closer contact with the colonizer acquire more resources than those that stayed far from deep penetration? Did these extra resources make this one group capable of exploiting those who did not come in closer contact with the colonizer? Did the former seize the fruits of the “post”-colonial state in the name of the modernity they had acquired through closer contact with the colonizer and then begin to use this to wield greater power at the cost of those who were also constructed by the newly-formed constitutions as free citizens of the same “post”-colony? Did the differentials of colonization continue to operate, then, within a single country, even after the colonizer had ostensibly departed? The Indian experience with the North Eastern nationalities or with the nationalities in the central regions of Chutnagpur and Chattisgarh would suggest that colonialism does not necessarily mean that the colonizer has to come from outside. In fact, to return to the origin of the root-word, the coloni was not established by those who came from outside; in fact, the original colonies of late Hellenism would seem to have more in common with the feudal structures of medievalism than with colonies as established in the context of capitalism. But in the case of internal colonialisms, too, the control of resources and the ability of capital to acquire this control were and still remain crucial. In so-called “post”-colonies, the uneven spread of “development,” leads to unequal access to resources, whether it is education or a government job. There is, by the logic of the structural inequality that characterizes the colonial formation, no reason not to think of areas within a single geopolitical entity as colonized. But of course, it is possible to think thus only if the understanding of the term itself is freed from a homogeneity that characterizes the theoretical discourse around Colonialism. Comparative methodology not only enables us to think of colonialisms in the plural; indeed, any twenty-first-century discipline, for its own survival, has begun to think of itself and the world with an ‘s’ attached to it. The real question is, what does this automatic pluralization imply in terms of theory and method? I would submit that the ability to answer this question is the strength of comparative methodology, which makes it imperative that more than a single location, or a single formation, be taken into consideration, and only thus it is possible to discern the complexities that characterize the condition of coloniality. [end page 27]
[1]. Charles Buxton qtd. in J.S. Coleman, Nigeria: Background to Nationalism. Berkeley: U of California P, 1960 [2]. Chinua Achebe, “The Empire Fights Back.” Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books, 2001 [3]. Chinua Achebe, “English and the African Writer.” Transition 4, no.18, 1965 [4]. Ngugi wa Thing’o, “On the Abolition of the English Department.” (Appendix to) Homecoming Essays in African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics. London: Heinemann Educational Books 1972
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