We tend to see political correctness and “cancel culture” through the jaundiced eyes of right-wing commentators. A closer look at two cases reveals the degree to which our own authoritarianism has succeeded in sanctioning what is blatantly racist and, conversely, in imposing upon one of the most effective denunciations of racism and imperialism a proscription by and for the Left.
American English departments soon obediently fell in line with Nigerian Nobel Prize winner Chinua Achebe’s judgment that Joseph Conrad’s anti-imperialist novel Heart of Darkness “dehumanizes” all Africans. This verdict rested on an equivocation that English teachers should have corrected in any freshman essay: the error of equating the voice of the narrator (the witness and raconteur Marlow) with the opinions of the author. Marlow’s shock and horror at the genocidal oppression of Africans in what is identifiably the Belgian Congo are only accentuated by his patent prejudices as a typical man of a colonialist era. We believe him because it’s in his racist class interest to report the opposite.
It should have sufficed (for academics less specialized than those of a typical English department) to note that their colleagues in History work with authoritative texts which rely upon the testimony of Conrad’s novel as an indictment of the monstrous injustice visited upon the native population: Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost, Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (Imperialism), or Sven Lindqvist’s “Exterminate All the Brutes.” All are powerful condemnations of racist genocide and all rely heavily on the testimony of Conrad. Certainly, Achebe’s view is worth taking into account, but not unreflectively. (The same English professors don’t seem to have been deterred from teaching Shakespeare simply because a great author named Tolstoy regarded his plays as immoral.) As an African novelist brandishing the ponderous club of racism, Achebe possessed an authority that white American academics were reluctant to ignore or disobey.
Yet the voice of another non-white author had the opposite effect in the case of V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul went largely unchallenged in ascribing to Africans a collective and congenital servility and ineptitude in his novel A Bend in the River. Here, too, one must note that Naipaul’s narrative voice might not be his own; however, in 1975 he published in the NYRB an article akin to his novel of 1979. “A New King for Africa” characterized Africa and Africans in much the same terms as the novel. My memory of reading and being amazed by the article as a graduate student was jarred by reading in the current issue of NYRB a critical article on Naipaul by Howard French. Among other devastating judgments singled out by French in Naipaul’s work is that mother of all racist assertions: namely that the docile Africans were eager for their own enslavement.
It was an era when post-colonial studies were just beginning to offer welcome opportunities to English faculty for funded research and teaching jobs. The putative third-world credentials and Nobel-earning writing skills of Naipaul rendered his blatantly racist judgments as impervious to condemnation as the same kind of credentials had rendered the object of Achebe’s criticism, the effectively anti-imperialist novel of Conrad, almost indefensible. Essentialist authority, not the actual content or effect of what had been written, was what counted.
With that kind of friends in academia, Africans don’t need enemies.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 