Christianity and Public Culture in Africa

3: Rejection or Reappropriation?: Christian Allegory and the Critique of Postcolonial Public Culture in the Early Novels of Ngugıwa Thiong'o

67 T h R E E Rejection or Reappropriation? Christian Allegory and the Critique of Postcolonial Public Culture in the Early Novels of Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong’o n i C H o l A S K A m A u - g o r o I N 1 9 8 6 the Association member episcopal Conferences of eastern Africa, representing ethiopia, Kenya, malawi, Sudan, tanzania, uganda, and Zambia, observed, “the African creative writers usually exhibit a social conscience, although, rightly or wrongly, they have become alienated from the Church. . . . the Church should see them as a challenge where matters of peace and social justice are concerned and should not continue to ignore them. the faith of future generations of Africans depends to some extent on a dialogue with their literary spokesmen. ultimately, the pen is mightier than the sword.”1 this statement is significant because it acknowledges that African writers have a moral vision and capacity to intervene in public culture in ways not always coincident with the church’s mission. because of their status as public spokespersons, pioneering writers like ngũgı̃ wa thiong’o, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Kofi Awoonor, and Ayi Kwei Armah have a large public who take them as moral beacons. if the writers become “alienated” from Christianity, it is easy to see why the church should see them as a challenge. How did the African writer acquire the image of a public spokesperson ? As Achebe has explained, the African writer models himself on the artist in African traditional society.2 As the “sensitive needle” of his community, the artist is at once the custodian of moral values 68 NIChOlAS KAMAU-gORO and an arbiter in his society.3 this interfacing of art, morality, and notions of the artist’s public role suggests that literary studies should pay closer attention to ethical issues. t. S. eliot’s call for a literary criticism that takes a definite “ethical and theological standpoint” has, however, been overshadowed by ahistorical methods of analysis that have tended to disassociate texts from their social context.4 African literature—its public role, its field of concerns, and its forms of representation—has been shaped by tradition. However, this was not the only influence. Writers had their consciousness indelibly marked by Christianity. this is because for most of them their first encounter with Western culture was through the mission school. As a part of the emergent African elite with a Western-style education, an element of historical accident cast the pioneer African writer to the forefront, where issues of national formation and development were being debated as Africa decolonized from the 1950s onward. in a sense, this historical conjuncture had predetermined the writers’ public role. A product of the mission school, ngũgı̃ started his literary career as a Christian but later developed into a radical critic of Christianity. despite this, Christian idioms and allegories remained prominent features of his aesthetic praxis. of all African writers, ngũgı̃ has perhaps most consistently used the bible as a frame of aesthetic reference. When he began to write, he was a Christian novelist who, in his own words, “used to go to Church at 5 o’clock in the morning” and was “quite sure my destiny lay in heaven, not hell.”5 ngũgı̃’s home area was adjacent to a Church of Scotland mission station. not surprisingly, he could not separate his Christian calling from his other calling as a writer. ngũgı̃ sees the two roles melding together in an aesthetic whose goal is the total liberation of the human person: “i am a writer. Some have even called me a religious writer. i write about people: i am interested in their hidden lives; their fears and hopes, their loves and hates . . . how, in other words, the emotional stream of the man interacts with the social reality.”6 An understanding of the forces behind the formation of ngũgı̃’s literary consciousness is important if we are to appreciate the uses of Christianity in his fiction. ngũgı̃ had a typical childhood in a household in which home education was through the traditional verbal arts of storytelling and riddling. His early education was in independent and mission schools. this was also a time of intensified nationalist agitation against colonialism in Kenya. gı̃kũyũ nationalists had fallen out with the Christian missionaries in the controversy of 1929–30 over the 69...