WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 11 (2007)

Kwaku Larbi Korang

[T]he most important issue in African cultural politics is the relationship of Africa with itself; the encounter of African nations, societies, and peoples with one another.

       — Biodun Jeyifo, “Literature in Postcolonial Africa.”

Taking Biodun Jeyifo’s observation in the epigraph above as a salient point of departure, this essay proffers an assessment of the late Ahmadou Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence. The encounter of the different African peoples with one another that Jeyifo refers to has occurred within the continent’s recent domination by European colonial imperialism. Within those same circumstances of domination the encounter acquires a postcolonial salience. Whatever their differences—ethnocultural and other—Africans encountered one other colonially as commonly subordinate relative to the dominant Europeans. How, then, were they to reencounter one another in circumstances where they would no longer be subordinate? This demand will produce the imaginings, meanings, and practices in which Africans would foresee themselves newly encountering one another as a free people—and if so ideally as one people. In its resolution as a postcolonial question, Africa’s future encounter with itself would be in a mode where its different peoples live in community imagined in a nationalist form. Out of the many one: the post-ethnic nation is ratified as an ethical vision of African postcolonial community.

It is precisely this African idealism about postcolonial community that we find a disillusioned Kourouma ideologically disengaging from in his post-independence novel. But would the reader of The Suns of Independence, this essay asks, be justified in endorsing without qualification its author’s dismissal of the nationalism that brought the post-independence nations of Africa into being? Were the pan-Africanist and negritudist rhetorics of national-popular unity by which Africans in various colonial territories mobilized their anticolonial struggles “all sound and fury, signifying nothing,” as Kourouma implies? Was the ideal message of decolonization—that Africans would together make themselves over in nationality, thereby fashioning themselves as modern communities that transcend the divides inhabited by their older ethnic communities—a gigantic swindle perpetrated by power-hungry elites without a shred of ethical conviction?

These critical propositions that can be read off The Suns of Independence are, of course, not Kourouma’s alone: that the African postcolonial and post-ethnic project of the nation has been bankrupted by ethical failure has been the staple of the African writing dubbed “the literature of disillusion.” We see this disillusion not only in the writings of an older generation of African writers, including Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, Wole Soyinka, Nuruddin Farah, Sony Labou Tansi; it is manifest in the writings of a younger generation as well, as we see most recently, for instance, in Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel. Are we to conclude from what appears to be a historically unabated sense of disillusion, therefore, that “nation” has failed the test of existential legitimacy on African soil—that it is not and cannot be an African practice of authentic community? One is drawn to make this conclusion reading The Suns of Independence, and especially so since the ideological effort of the novel is to revalidate and reaffirm—even as its narrative and narratorial commentary mourns the deathly compromising of—the ethnic community.

In this essay, then, I read Kourouma’s first novel as offering an ethical alternative to the nation by way of aligning the reader with an ethnocentric (and hence anti-nationalist) vision. My reading, I admit from the outset, is done in a spirit of nationalist partisanship—one that holds that the search for post-ethnic community remains an African necessity. What I do therefore is, as it were, put the ethnocentrism of Kourouma on trial in order to weigh whether, indeed, the ethnic is justified as the sole ethical practice of community and mode of belonging in Africa.

Let me begin with what are by now theoretical and critical commonplaces about narrative and narratology, in an effort to identify the modes by which Kourouma’s The Suns of Independence does its critical, cultural, and ideological work. First, every narrative is informed by a more or less coherent ideological vision, a vision that is cumulatively reaffirmed in the scenes and situations that the plot of the narrative articulates. Secondly, the aim of narrative art is to get readers to potentially give their assent to the particular ideological vision, or worldview, a narrative embodies. This pragmatic dimension of narrative is accomplished through various rhetorical-cum-aesthetic strategies employed by author/narrator. If the operation of these strategies is to persuade or “seduce” readers, they do so most effectively because they anchor readerly perception in feeling. The rhetorical and aesthetic components of narrative are there to move readers, to manipulatively capture their hearts, to make them feel sympathy or antipathy, in order to win their minds over. The effort to produce readerly identification and/or disidentification, then, is very much woven into the pragmatics of narrative. And if it is the rhetorical-cum-aesthetic element that operationalizes this affective dimension of in narrative, this element is also set up thereby to interfere with and influence readerly evaluations of character and situation positively or negatively. (For an elaboration of these claims, see, among others, the works of Booth, Chambers, and Nkosi.)

I open with these points because as readers ofThe Suns of Independence, our affective capacities to either identify or disidentify with, and our judgemental capacities to either credit or discredit, are enlisted to join a fight, a social and political contestation, going on in the novel. The novel’s rhetorical effort is to make the reader emotionally and judgementally assent to the ideological legitimacy, the existential truth, and the moral justice of the claims of one side in this contestation. And that which is being contested is the legitimacy of the political, social, and ideological formation that Achille Mbembe has called the African postcolony. For the critical narrative voice in Kourouma’s novel, therefore, postcolonial time—the one that goes by the name “independence”; and postcolonial space—the one that goes by the name of “the nation”—carry neither moral nor existential legitimacy.

If The Suns of Independence enlists its reader’s identification with—and support for—an antinationalist project of delegitimizing the postcolony, what is the normative standpoint from which the novel undertakes its tasks of rhetorical and ideological persuasion? Ethnicity is the answer: Malinke ethnicity is the reference point of The Suns of Independence, the self-conscious place from where its narrator engages with the world, and manipulatively demands of his reader to do the same. The cultural commonsense of the Malinke ethnic group, therefore, provides the ideological ambience, the moral authority, and political orientation of Kourouma’s novel.

This cultural commonsense is something we are made powerfully aware of on the very first page of The Suns of Independence, which opens with the announcement of the death of a Malinke person. “One week had passed,” we are told, “since Ibrahima Kone, of the Malinke race, had met his death in the capital city. . . .” (3). Kone had died in the national capital of the Ebony Coast, in non-Malinke territory, and the narrator goes on to tell us: “I swear that if the deceased had been of the blacksmith caste, and if we weren’t living in the era of Independence (The Suns of Independence, the Malinke say) no one would have dared bury him far away in foreign soil” (3).

Inducing in the reader pathos for a death that occurs far away from home, the narrative voice encourages him/her to view Kone’s displacement in terms of a cultural and material geography of ethnic displacement and exile. The man’s death takes place well outside the ethnic borders of the Malinke—that is to say outside the boundaries of the cultural commonsense that articulates Malinke community and identity. Already, in the opening pages of The Suns of Independence, we have an intimation of what would be recurrent theme in the novel: things have fallen apart for the Malinke with the coming of The Suns of Independence.

Nevertheless we are also informed by the narrator that the dead Kone’s shade or spirit traveled all the way back home and carried out certain actions in accordance with Malinke custom and prescription. And after the fortieth-day funeral rites, Kone’s shade “took its leave [of the city] forever, and walked back to the Malinke homeland, there to bring joy to a mother through reincarnation as a Malinke infant” (4). And so in death the exile returns home, repositioning himself within a homegrown metaphysics that guarantees that his death has a life-giving communal significance. To die is to have the opportunity to begin over again.

Korouma, we might say, begins his novel not with a sense of an ending but of ethnic continuity; a retrieval of Malinke-ness in a sense of eternal ethnic self-renewal. The opening of The Suns of Independence, therefore, is done as a statement of, and a celebration of, the popular tenacity of the Malinke spirit. The point will be reinforced at the end of the novel when the hero, Fama, meets his fate of personal extinction and the extirpation of the Dumbuya dynasty of Horodugu, whose last wretched representative he is. Some of the most exalted lyricism of the novel is reserved for the moment when Fama is dying, and the novel concludes on a suspended note: “A Malinke had died. Day would follow day until the seventh day and the seventh-day funeral rites, then after a few weeks would come the fortieth day and the fortieth-day funeral rites, and. . . .” (136).

The indomitability of the popular spirit of Malinke ethnicity, therefore, is affirmed in spite of the figures of displacement and death associated with Malinke-ness at the beginning and ending of the novel. In the antinomies of death and life, ending and continuity, that inscribe it, ethnicity’s legitimacy within itself, its right to exist, is affirmed right before the reader’s eyes. As the reader turns the pages of the novel, he/she soon realizes why this affirmation is necessary. For it is a supreme act of faith by the ethnocentric narrative voice in the face of the Malinke as a sociohistorically endangered ethnic species. And what is endangering the Malinke is nothing but the arrival of The Suns of Independence, which comes with a new, dangerous politics wherein the postcolonial state usurps legitimate ethnic prerogatives and privileges. What is more, it installs in practice policies of ethnically based social exclusion, leaving the northern and savannah-based Malinke sociogeographically disadvantaged compared to their southern forest-based counterparts.

One of the characteristics that the novel’s hero, Fama, laments is his illiteracy, the consequence of which has been to exclude him from a party-political post in the post-independence dispensation. Fama reads his personal exclusion allegorically: this is obvious in his various outbursts against those from the forests of the south whom he recurrently refers to as “uncircumcised baboons” and “sons of slaves.” In the sociopolitical geography of ethnicity and power that The Suns of Independence hands us, it would seem that the savannah region of the Ebony Coast has lost out to the forest region.

I shall return to this question of allegory shortly and try to justify a thesis that The Suns of Independence is to be read as an ethnic allegory; that its central character, Fama, is presented as the allegorical embodiment of an endangered Malinke ethnicity. For now a look at the postcolonial politics that usurps the prerogatives that shapes Malinke ethnic identity. So linked to trade is Malinke ethnic prosperity and well-being that this trade is not something that can be extricated from this ethnic group’s self-definition and sense of self-esteem. Thus in the second chapter of the novel we learn that

what matters most to a Malinke is freedom of trade. And the French [in the colonial era] . . . stood for the freedom of trade that enabled . . . the big Malinke traders to prosper. It was through trade and war together that the Malinke race, like one man, heard, saw, walked and breathed; these two things were at once its eyes, its ears, its feet, its loins. (13)

French colonization of what is now the Ebony Coast had outlawed war, and yet this tragic amputation of the Malinke self had been a mixed blessing. For all the obnoxiousness of colonial rule, the French had favored free trade: there was, therefore, at some level, a political identity of interest between Malinke-ness and colonial rule. When we look at the situation of Fama, the legitimate heir of the throne of Horodugu who, because of French interference, was unjustly passed over in favor of his cousin Lasina, it is true that the Malinke lost something during the suns of colonialism. They may have lost their ethnic sovereignties; but they also gained something in return: prosperity and a sense of ethnic wellbeing. The ethic of colonialism could be read favorably as one of live and let live, as is done by the narrative voice aligned in agreement with the central character Fama’s in The Suns of Independence.

If, on the one hand, the French were accommodating of ethnic prerogative under the colonial order, we are told by the narrator, on the other hand, that “Independence [had] ruined trade, and there was no sign of war.” As consequence, at the time the novel opens, “the Malinke species, tribes, land and civilization, was dying: crippled, deaf, blind . . . and sterile” (13). What has come with The Suns of Independence is a winner-takes-all attitude in the political domain; and the big winners in this case are the functionaries of the one party which dominates the state. The novel encourages an interpretation of the one party as an exclusive and clubby sort of “new ethnicity,” state-sponsored, and politically mobilized against other ethnicities like the Malinke, with their own ancient, historically validated claims and culturally legitimated prerogatives. Insofar as the novel hands us a tragic accounting of what befell the Malinke during the suns of colonialism and what is befalling it now as The Suns of Independence unfold, it shows us that colonial tragedy was a mixed blessing while postcolonial tragedy plays out as an unmixed horror. The postcolony is defined by a parasitic state whose ethic is live and let die.

But how is this horror represented, as a matter of technique, and through what empirical and emblematic characteristics of the main character is it focused? It is Karl Marx who pointed out that “History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Kourouma appears to be working in terms of a similar understanding in The Suns of Independence, for the novel shows us that what has succeeded the colonial tragedy of the Malinke is postcolonial farce, tragic farce. And the focus of this farcical tragedy, when the novel opens, is on the circumstances of Fama, the dynastic Dumbuya prince who is displaced from his Horodugu kingdom and home. Fama’s consciousness, aligned with the narrator’s, remembers the good old days at home:

Oh! Horodugu, you were what this city lacked, and everything that had given Fama the happy childhood of a prince, that too was lacking (sun, honour and gold): when at rising the slave grooms brought the horse for morning parade, when at second prayer the praise-singers sang the everlasting power of the Dumbuya. (12)

It is the changed times that induce Fama’s nostalgia: in The Suns of Independence this prince of high aristocratic caste is just another illiterate Malinke migrant reduced to an undignified life of beggary, shameless opportunism, and scavenging in the capital city of the Ebony Coast. We have the irony of a man of high caste who has become a part of the city’s lumpenproletariat, the unemployed and unemployable underclass. If among his fellow Malinke migrants he insists quite quixotically on the distinction of his birth, on noblesse oblige, for them he is a figure of fun and, on occasion, insults. Fama, the down-and-out aristocrat, is a man of ill-temper that his fellow Malinke humor without taking seriously.

Historically, the tables have turned: what once upon a time was the highest and noblest embodiment of Horodugu’s Malinke peoplehood is now, because of The Suns of Independence, a parody of itself, reduced to the lowest of the low. Yet we notice that if Fama and his actions are farcical, this is serious farce, for Fama does not simply represent himself in the novel. What his situation of material poverty and his biological condition of impotence representatively point to is the significance of the totality of Malinke life under the new dispensation. And the sense we have is ethnic life, as representatively embodied in Fama’s, lived in the mode of the tragic absurd. (Just as Frantz Fanon’s autobiographical experiences in “The Fact of Blackness,” also cast in the mode of the tragic absurd, become defining points for racial biography, so we are encouraged to conflate Fama’s postindependence experiential biography with, so to speak, “The Fact of Malinke-ness.”) Fama and his story of durance are mobilized in an ethnic allegory—an ethnic allegory that emerges in uncompromising opposition to post-independence national allegory that claims to unite the people across ethnicity into the national community.

A question Kourouma’s novel poses, therefore, is: how stands the claim that community is authentically represented in the nation, and in those who embody its authority? How does the nation represent itself, and is this representation consonant with the lived realities of the postcolony? There is, first, the nation’s self-legitimation in its racial articulation of the community of the postcolony as black. This is captured in the “Ebony” in the name Ebony Coast carried by the newly independent country. The quality of being an ebony nation—that is to say a pan-African community—however, masks what Kourouma represents as a dangerous ethnicization of the national-communal idea(l). As Fama makes his first journey of return on a bus to Horodugu, in the socialist republic of Nikinai, The Suns of Independence makes us privy to an exchange that is shocking in the depth of its ethnic bigotry, bigotry masquerading as nationalism. What we hear from a member of the Sery ethnic group is that violence, black-on-black, was necessary to purge the nation of others, who, although they are racially African, are to be ethnically identified as foreigners. The speaker, preaching his violent thesis of ethnic cleansing, concludes with the lines: “Africa would know peace when every African stayed at home” (60). If in the era of decolonization Fanon saw it as axiomatic that “the truths of the nation are its only realities,” Kourouma rejects this axiom. For him, it appears that truth in the postcolony is the reality of competition for ethnic advantage—and that those ethnic groups that, as a result of the quirks of colonial history, have unfairly acquired a comparative advantage over others have recreated their ethnicity in the image of the nation.

What transpires after independence, therefore, is a pseudo-nation, not a true national community. And this pseudo-nation of the postcolony can only have pseudo-leaders, persons who have no true communal representative character. “It is well known,” we are told in the novel, “that the rulers of The Suns of Independence often consulted marabouts and sorcerers; but for whose sake and why? . . . [N]ever for the community’s sake” (109). The socialism that is the official state ideology in the republic of Nikinai has simply given the functionaries of the one-party the carte blanche to dispossess propertied people of their hard-earned wealth and to take this wealth over for themselves. And so the novel observes that “the people of Independence know neither truth nor honour; they are capable of anything. . . .” (117). We see this observation in practice when Fama is jailed by the state in the Ebony Coast for plotting to overthrow the republic, with the evidence for his conviction based absurdly on a dream he had had that the state deems subversive.

For all these reasons, the nation in The Suns of Independence is a “contested referent,” to borrow Uzo Esonwanne’s expression. The nationalist slogans of “fraternity and humanism” emanating from the postcolonial state, and meant for popular consumption, are shown to be a sham, empty attempts at legitimizing what Fama refers to as “bastard unlawful rule” (69); and “the unlawful rule of sons of slaves” (107).

What is lawful and legitimate, therefore, does not belong in the present, which is the temporality of The Suns of Independence. The lawful and the legitimate belong in the ethnic order—a proposition that the novel reaffirms when Fama returns home for his dead cousin’s funeral. If the device of the return journey employed by the novel marks a return both in space and time—the space-time of the Malinke’s living past—it is an opportunity for the novel to make us witnesses to the devastation visited on this living past. Horodugu has not been spared colonial and postcolonial efforts to undermine the ethnocultural legitimacy that underwrites its sociopolitical life. We are told that “[c]olonization, district commissioners, requisitions, epidemics, drought, Independence, the single party and the revolution are all bred of the same dam, all foreign to Horodugu, a kind of curse brought on [the Malinke] by the devil” (91). And, furthermore, “[w]hat with Independence, the single party, the committee and all the rest, the Malinke were giddy with exhaustion” (91). The new temporality of the postcolony has the older one of Malinke-Horodugu in a stranglehold and is slowly choking the life out of the institutions that are its lifeblood. Presenting a hunters’ dance that has been reduced to a pale shadow of itself, the narrator regretfully muses: “Truly The Suns of Independence are unsuited to great things; they have not only unmanned, but also unmagicked Africa. There was no startling wizardry to be seen, only a few little tricks that Fama had seen performed fifty times over by a European conjurer in the city” (100). This loss of cultural potency is mirrored in Fama’s physical impotence: what we can read off both is the Malinke people’s defeat and postcolonial incorporation into a universe that threatens to reduce them to emasculated subjecthood. Clearly, in the novel’s critique, the potency of Independence has come to some at the expense of others: the Malinke, losers, are left clutching a pseudo-independence.

We may ask, however: is the novel really justified in rhetorically seducing its reader into taking the side of the ethnic community because, in its terms, this community is a better ethical proposition compared to the pseudo-national one? As represented in Kourouma’s narrative, what is ethnicity’s own ideological unconscious? Let us look at the image of women as captured in the language and cultural practices of Malinke ethnicity. For instance, we are told in a striking simile that a hunter’s shot “had no more force to it than a grandmother’s fart” (86); and yet another simile reminds us that independence has brought so much poverty to Horodugu that its people can only offer for ceremonial sacrifice “a half-starved ram” with “[b]lood as thin as the menstrual fluid of a dried up old maid” (96). When Fama contemplates taking his dead cousin’s wife Mariam as his second wife, we are told that “Mariam would be his thing” (90). And this objectification of Malinke womanhood is something we are reminded of again when the lyricism that announces the dying of Fama at the end of the novel refers to him as: “The virile! Sole possessor of strength and stiffness between the thighs” (135). What this disparaging and objectifying of Malinke womanhood reveals about the ethnic allegory in The Suns of Independence is that its tropes and referents are masculinist. How much, we might ask, does the ethnic community’s claim to be ethical stand up when a return to the authenticity of the past is a matter of an ethnic perpetuation of the privileging of male over female?

Then, again, if Kourouma’s ethnic allegory is guilty of demoting femininity in a humanity whose norm is projected as masculine, it is also guilty of the confusion of conflating a strong current of aristocratic interest with the ethnic interest. All the scheming that goes on when Fama returns to Horodugu is done to protect his and others’ ancient aristocratic and caste privileges. But this is done under the disguise of protecting a Malinke identity and a way of life shared in common. Yet we must question this way of life that is based on a caste hierarchy, and on the pernicious distinction it makes between freeborn and slave. In this connection, it needs to be pointed out that whatever else is wrong with The Suns of Independence, this era has achieved a form of leveling. Those who were consigned to inferior status as slaves under the old ethnic order are now socially and politically enfranchised, a positivity registered by default in Fama’s aristocratic outburst a local functionary of the national party in power: “The president of the committee, the son of a slave. Who ever saw the son of a slave giving orders?” (92). And yet the so-called “son of a slave” is preaching democratic virtue: “fraternity, humanism,” and has “conquered the villagers by his eloquence” (93). He embodies in practice the nationalist idealism that Fama refuses to endorse: “[Fama] did not condescend to utter so much as three words. A Dumbuya . . . could not lower himself to the extent of speaking at any length before a committee made up of sons of slaves” (93). For us to be on the side of Fama—as the implied author or the novel wants us to be—is clearly to give an ethically untenable legitimacy to an undemocratic consciousness.

The story of Fama’s wife, Salimata, who, before meeting her husband is subjected to a brutal excision and rape among her Malinke people, shows us that the past-legitimized Malinke order is not free of those very compulsions, coercions, and violence that the novel accuses The Suns of Independence of. When Salimata settles in the city—this new postethnic space—it is a place of refuge, and not exile, for her. What it represents is a new beginning for her, and she appears to be willing to live in this new world on the terms that it offers her. For Fama, on the other hand, torn away from the trappings of Dumbuya power in Horodugu, the city is a place of abandonment and despair. Fama is a fish out of water, floundering in an uncongenial medium. For him, therefore, all effort at saving himself appears to be vain, and so he sits at home doing nothing, leaving the industrious Salimata to be the breadwinner of the household. In stark contrast to Fama, Salimata is a fish looking hard for water. She tries to make the most of a bad situation. Her philosophy must be, as it were: “When the times change we must change with them.” But Fama, stuck in an ideal but useless aristocratic image of himself, is left endlessly blaming The Suns of Independence—blaming everything but himself—for his reduced circumstances.

Which of these two stories, then, is to be accorded narrative breathing space to unfold? Certainly not the tale of Salimata, a tale which suggests feminine rejection of the ethnic order, and a corresponding accommodation with The Suns of Independence. To pursue the story of a woman for whom the new space-time of the postcolony has given considerable breathing space—away from the customary and patriarchal terrors of the ethnic group—is to precisely give ethical legitimacy to The Suns of Independence. That, it would seem, Kourouma’s narrator cannot allow to happen. Hence Salimata’s narrative comes to a screeching halt at the end of the fourth chapter of The Suns of Independence, compelled to make way for the tale of Fama, a masculine tale of alienation, emasculation, and impotence induced by and under The Suns of Independence. With our focus shifted to Salimata’s (biological) barrenness, her story is relocated in, and made an appendage to, the male-centered ethnic allegory, reinforcing the physical and symbolic impotence of the allegorical protagonist, Fama.

It seems, ultimately, that we must question the charge of illegitimacy and inauthenticity that Kourouma prefers against the postcolonial nation in the light of these problematic aspects of his (narrator’s) ethnocentric vision. But we must recall in doing so that there is an Africanist ideological camp that is on the side of the vision informing Kourouma’s novel, a camp that sharply defends the ethnic as an African absolute of community and belonging, as an irreducible norm of African self-identification and self-knowledge. Christopher Miller emerges in his Theories of Africans as an important representative of this ethnocentric camp, defending the absolutist stance on ethnicity in Africa in a categorical assertion that for this continent the ethical community is and must be the ethnic community.

In light of this, therefore, in Africa the nation-form fails the test of legitimacy and ethics absolutely: nation has no business taking on an African form. For nationalism, as Miller argues, is an un-African ideology and practice foisted on the continent by deluded ideologues represented iconically, in Miller’s view, by Frantz Fanon (and also Amilcar Cabral). Making loud claims for founding the African nation as a progressive form of community that transcends ethnicity, African nationalism installs itself in opposition to the supposedly dangerous particularisms of ethnic difference. Ethnic community and identity are figured by the African nationalist ideologues as retrograde, inimical to progress, etc.—a backward form of community that needs to be transcended. In Miller’s opinion, however, these attempts to give nation an Africanist legitimacy are misguided. And this critique emerges sharply as he examines the nationalist writings of Fanon, the influential theorist of African decolonization:

Fanon’s use of the word “nation” [as appropriate for the African context] covers over important unresolved tensions between ethnicity and ethics; by placing the word at the center of his concern for evolution without questioning the complexities of its application to different geographical and cultural environments, Fanon winds up imposing his own idea of nation in places where it may need reappraising. As David Caute has accurately pointed out, “It is curious that Fanon, who wanted to snap the bonds of European culture, should have transformed arbitrary European structures into the natural units of African progress.” Far from being “natural national entities” or cohesive nation-states, the modern nations of black Africa must make do with borders created to satisfy European power-brokering in the “scramble for Africa,” borders that often violate rather than reinforce units of culture. They are for the most part, communities that were “imagined” on the conference of Europe, inherited by Africans, who must deal with their contradictions. (48)

What Miller finds in the (decolonizing) narrative and (postcolonial) practice of the African nation is that the former sanctions, while the latter enacts, a violent subjugation of (ethnic) difference. Counterposed to the violent, upstart African nation, it is the ethnic that is permitted by Miller to claim the ethical high ground as the natural—and hence non-coercively expressed—form of African community and identity. Ethnicity in Africa is defended by Miller as self-validating; it has no need for a nationalist makeover that will sublate its difference.

Kourouma’s brilliant critique in The Suns of Independence of the very real shortcomings that have made a mockery of post-independence nation-building in Africa accords very well with Miller’s argument. But we must insist that the argument against the postcolony is really an argument against the state, that entity of power that in our critiques we must decouple from the popular nation. That we can bring a valid charge of ethical failure against the postcolonial state does not mean that the nation whose lofty post-ethnic imagining the state perverts in postcolonial practice is also unethical. It ought to be possible for us not to confuse nationalist principle—as most ethically advanced in the works of Fanon and Cabral—with the actual failures of African nationalist performance; and thus we might avoid using the failures as an excuse to delegitimize the principle.

In contrast to The Suns of Independence, some other African literary works of disillusion do not confuse the critique of postcolonial power (the state) with a critique of the (principle of the) nation. Take, for instance, the contention in Ayi Kwei Armah’s first novel that The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Armah may be harshly critical of the practices of postcolonial nationalist power for failing to nurture the conditions that would give birth to the “beautyful [sic] ones”; nevertheless the implication is that he remains (minimally) hopeful that the “beautyful ones”—metaphor for a reformed African community—may yet be born (via a morally retooled nationalism). Although disappointed in, and willing to question harshly, his “earlier enthusiasm with The Suns of Independence” (Appiah 155), Armah’s faith in nation as a legitimately African vision of community remains intact. However, this nationalist faith is one that has moved from optimism to what Kwame Anthony Appiah calls a critical “postoptimism” (155). The same can be read off the title of Helon Habila’s recent novel Waiting for an Angel.

In conclusion: As we rethink and reimagine community in the troubled era of The Suns of Independence, a postoptimistic nationalism, one that insists on the African legitimacy of nation, is perhaps what we need and not a reversion to ethnocentrism. I would hope that my reading of The Suns of Independence has shown that Kourouma’s representation of the postcolony does not reveal an absolute ethical distinction between good (the ethnic community) and bad (nation). To the extent that the ethnic sphere that is upheld by Kourouma over the (pseudo)-nation has its own impressive shortcomings and limitations, a critical reading of the novel can only reveal the relevant distinction as a relative one between better and worse. So which of the two spheres—ethnic community or nation—is better and which is worse? Clearly, the novelist wants his readership to incline towards the viewpoint that the postcolonial nation is worse. However, were we to put the question of better and worse to Salimata we know what her answer would be. Unfortunately her voice—the voice that would have given an African legitimacy to the nation-form, however postcolonially compromised—is suppressed by Kourouma so that the argument for ethnicity, as solely the authentic and ethical form of African community, would carry the day.

Works Cited

Achebe, Chinua. A Man of the People. London: Heinemann, 1964.

Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born. London: Heinemann, 1969.

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern.” In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: OUP, 1992.

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1961.

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Citation Format:

Kwaku Larbi Korang. “Ethnic or Post-Ethnic Community for Africa? A Critique of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Critique of the Nation in The Suns of Independence” West Africa Review: Issue 11, 2007.

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