The Conradian Narrator

By Shaadi Baylor

 

         In recent months, there has been no greater exemplification of the Western world’s perception of Uganda as a stagnant and ahistorical nation than the launch of Invisible Children’s Kony 2012 campaign. That the effort to end the Lord’s Resistance Army’s (LRA) attack on civilians is nearly twenty years overdue does not appear to confound the multitudes who support the organization’s efforts. A decade’s delayed response to the conflict suggests that the enslavement and murders of hundreds, if not thousands, of children by the LRA in the 1980s and 1990s did not exist, and perhaps do not even matter, to a Western world too comfortable overlooking Uganda. Granted, it is difficult for young, Western consumers of information to envision the continent outside a Conradian framework. 

        

           Fiction may be the most influential lens through which we learn about Africa.  In many ways, the history and literature spawned from the continent are often indistinguishable from one another. The delicate balance between fiction and actuality both bore Kony2012 and continues to feed the myth, without reasonable nuance and context. In both real life and in fiction, the tone of the story, with regard to its attitude toward Africa and its peoples, comes down to the narrator’s perception of their position and status in the conflict. Protagonists superimpose their presence over major events sometimes overshadowing the more historically pertinent development of events. How much of Africa do they allow to exist when they are not present to define it?  In both literature and reality, outsiders assign themselves the utmost importance when discussing Africa. Their individual experiences are merely microcosms of the greater dynamic between Africa and the West. 

         Perhaps one of the most controversial postcolonial works of fiction set in Africa, V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River is narrated by Salim, a young man of Indian descent who has moved from his home on the eastern coast of Africa inland, to a newly born country.  During the years Salim resides in his unnamed town, he is privy to making coarse generalizations about the native citizenry. Even as a beautifully written work of fiction, A Bend in the River’s profusion of broad sweeping generalizations about the continent are frustrating; Naipaul refuses to allow himself to be identified as African yet he feels entitled to expound upon developments in the region with often inflammatory language. Though the author is often attacked for his insensitivity toward the post-colonial conflict, there are insightful moments when he references the dynamic between Westerners at the local university (the Domain), their attitude towards Africa, and more importantly, the vision of Africa that Westerners impose upon young African students. Salim explains that “in the Domain, Africans…were romantic…In the town ‘African’ could be a word of abuse or disregard; in the Domain it was a bigger word.  An ‘African’ there was a new man whom everybody was busy making, a man about to inherit” (119).  Critics might find this insight into such subtle conditions to be contentious but a less cynical analysis suggests he is making a statement regarding a relationship in which outsiders manipulate power dynamics so as to assign Africans an identity. 

         And thus it was a refreshing move onto Giles Foden’s The Last King of Scotland. The novel’s narrator, Nicholas Garrigan, is unembarrassed by the Eurocentrism that shapes the purview of his experience in Uganda.  The novel is interesting in relation to other accounts of Africa in that Dr. Garrigan does not even begin to make gross statements about the country or the continent.  He is unashamed of his self-centeredness and his miniscule, even negligible, position in the future of Uganda to the point where he is often unable to admit to his own complicity in the deaths of others.  Foden’s prose pale in comparison to Naipaul’s eloquence and it is often the subject matter alone that compels the reader to continue, but this is not the only thing that bars it from becoming a timeless work.  Foden does not tell us how to feel about Africa and in that he loses some of his authority on the subject.  How can we trust a man who himself admits to ignorance? 

It should be mentioned here that I recently returned from a 9-month stay in Uganda, a volunteer experience which affected me deeply.  I understand that this complicates my critique of Kony 2012 and literature related to the continent. It seems that in the process of attacking a stereotype, I have found myself to be the archetype of another: the bright-eyed youth who wishes to rectify the wrongs inflicted upon a vulnerable continent.  Watching Kony2012 was an eerie, if not wholly disturbing experience. Sitting in my comfortable home, I watched as Jason Russell used colonial language to convince all too many uninformed viewers that he had discovered this conflict, much in the same way John Hanning Speke discovered the source of the Nile a century and a half before.  Had I not been sitting in Uganda as I watched the short film, maybe I too would have believed Russell’s claims.

Shaadi graduated from Barnard in 2011, then spent last year doing work in Uganda.