Post-Marxism in an African Context: The Usability of Antonio Gramsci

In 1984, Présence Africaine featured a paper by Ayi Kwei Armah that amounted to an actual manifesto in its resolute indictment of a Marxist approach to African culture: "Masks and Marx: The Marxist Ethos vis-à-vis African Revolutionary Theory and Praxis." As "an African, an artist, a scholar," Armah took a peremptory and even resentful stance: "Marxism, in its approach to non-Western societies and values, is decidedly colonialist, Western, Eurocentric and hegemonist"; "Marxism [. . .] is demonstrably racist—racist in a prejudiced, determined, dishonest and unintelligent fashion" (35-65). It should be stressed that Armah's attack, quite consistently given the premises of his argument, hit at the historicist underpinnings of Marxism, denouncing the inadequacy of a "linear philosophy of history" brought to bear on non-Western societies, and consequently on Africa. Singularly paralleling the conceptual framework of his novel Two Thousand Seasons, Armah briFskly concluded that "it needs to be pointed out that African history is the history of the African people, not the history of Europeans or Arabs in Africa." Five years later, in his book The Theory of African Literature, Chidi Amuta voiced a vigorous rebuttal of Armah's paradigm. "Armah is flogging a dead horse," he wrote, and went on insisting on the necessity "to transcend the limitations of orthodox Marxism," in that "historical materialism transcends Marxism and embodies a certain theoretical elasticity that could salvage Marxism from the present crisis and imminent obsolescence" (59-60).

Armah's and Amuti's views, both controversial and objectionable, should be taken into account because they effectively convey a dichotomy or a dilemma central to any discussion on African literature, on its significance, on its rationale also in the light of the most recent developments. Armah ostensibly refers to a traditional and consolidated image of Marxism, to a category that I would call Ur-Marxism, and he dismisses or ignores any further stage or frame of reference, well present to Amuta or to other African scholars of Marxist extraction—if not of Marxist loyalty—possibly in consequence of the Western ancestry of such a phenomenon and, individually, of the best known neo-Marxists or post-Marxists: Raymond Williams, Theodor Adorno, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and, first of all, Antonio Gramsci. Nevertheless, his essay channels and, to some extent, anticipates on the one hand a reaction against the ideological immersion that characterized the cultural debate in Africa for at least two decades, and on the other the increasing impatience with Western categories somehow forced upon African culture, or more conspicuously and aggressively in the pronouncements of some African radicals such as Chinweizu, it is now being reformulated to a large scale. A good case in point can be seen in the professed rejection of a number of typically Western shibboleths ("multicultural," "postcolonial") that surfaced as a key-note at the ALA conference in Accra, in March 1994.

At this point, we are facing a provocative paradox. When Armah fights back and tackles the crucial issue of hegemony, he undoubtedly borrows from Marxist terminology. If we intend to extrapolate three fundamental categories from Gramsci's conceptualization, they will inevitably be as follows: a) the notion of hegemony; b) the notion of popular-national culture; c) the notion of the so called "organic intellectual." The paradox—if any—is clearly stated and coherently systematized by Edward Said: "But only recently have Westerners become aware that what they have to say about the history and the cultures of 'subordinate' people is challengeable by the peoples themselves [. . .] who a few years back were simply incorporated, culture, land, history and all, into the great Western empires, and their disciplinary discourses. [. . .] An immense wave of anti-colonial and ultimately anti-imperial activity, thought, and revision has overtaken the massive edifice of Western empire, challenging it, to use Gramsci's vivid metaphor, in a mutual siege" (235). And further on: "If direct political control has disappeared, economic, political and...