Secrets: Farah's "Things Fall Apart"

It has become quite common today to hear the African state being described as the “failed state.” Most African states are fundamentally without roots in the societies in which they find themselves. Institutional collapse abounds and, in its bid to survive, the failed state sometimes devours its own citizens—the rage of the castrated. The African state in places like Rwanda, Liberia, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo must now either be “rescued” by international action or be destroyed by the monumental forces bearing down upon them. The record of performance in virtually every function of the state, from revenue collection to control of national resources, from provision of basic services to its ability to monopolize the use of violence, suggests that the state in many African countries is ailing and not a few have headed for total collapse (see Mazrui and Mazrui).

But how does one explain this development of the African state in decay? What are the roots and meanings of what we have been observing from Monrovia to Maputo, from Kigali to Kismayuu? As one would expect, several theses have been advanced over the years—from the problematic nature of the colonial legacy of the unitary state in societies that are primarily multi-ethnic to the lack of organic fit between the inherited state and Africa’s indigenous cultural dispensation. And the contributors to this important debate touching on the politico-economic and sociocultural destiny of the continent have included major African creative writers like Chinua Achebe and Nuruddin Farah.

In grappling with this theme—in the context of Somalia (but in a way that is generalizable to the rest of Africa—in his award-winning postmodernist novel, Secrets, Farah offers what amounts to a “moralistic” explanation that shares certain parallels with the one advanced by Chinua Achebe to explain how things came to fall apart in the Igbo “state” of Umuofia. There is a sense, in fact, in which Secrets can be considered as Farah’s response in the postcolonial context to Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, with the initial moment of colonial contact between Africa and the West as its historical setting.

In contrast to colonialist writers like Joseph Conrad, Achebe draws a picture of a well-structured social and religious order in an African society that, as the dialogue between the missionary Mr. Brown and Akunna, one of the great men of the village, demonstrates, is not any less rational than the order which the British colonizers were seeking to impose (Achebe 126–28). But Achebe goes further to show that the Umuofian moral order that gave the society its sense of cohesion and integrity was experiencing some severe “cracks” just at a time when it was engaged in a new encounter with an external force. Prominent among these cracks was the privileging of the male principle at the expense of the female, sometimes in total negation of the spiritual order. If there was a certain degree of parity between the Gods and Goddesses of the Igbo in the power they shared,Umuofians on the ground made power the preserve of men to the exclusion of the agbala (be they of female or male sex). These cracks in Umuofia’s moral order that unjustly favored some and condemned others made the society vulnerable to external cultural invasion of Christianity and colonialism. The invader was thus able to “put a knife in the things that held Umuofians together” and Umuofia quickly fell apart (Achebe 124–25).

The victory of colonialism in Umuofia, as in the rest of Africa, eventually led to the construction of a new state that was bequeathed to postcolonial societies with all the trappings of its colonial heritage. As indicated earlier, this form of the state is now also on the decline. Unlike the explanations offered for the demise of many other states, however, the disintegration of the Somali state has been popularly attributed to “clan” politics and competition. And Secrets affirms that the communal violence orchestrated by the warlords following the fall of Muhammad Siad Barre was indeed organized along clan lines...