The Politics of the Canon!

The politics of what is taught in African schools and colleges is a continuing debate in the post-colonial era because until recently many departments of English, and often the sole departments offering literature, would teach only British authors from William Shakespeare to Bernard Shaw. While the debates were more intense in Africa of the sixties and seventies, the issues are still relevant today in the context of the entire politics of the canon occasioned by the vehemence with which many people in the West and even in the former colonies defend the purity of Western civilization. William Shakespeare must not be tarnished by being placed side by side with literary upstarts from Africa, Asia and South America. This defence of purity and fear of tarnishment is linked to another tendency in the area of theory: the almost total omission of colonialism, racism and ideologies of repression and their opposites, anti-colonialism, anti-racist struggles and ideologies of liberation, in the debates about the constitution of modernity and post-modernity. Why was this pattern so in the colonial past and why does it still persist in the post colonial era? Has it all been an accident of persons, content, time and place?

The content of our litera ture syllabus, its presentation, the machinery for determining the choice of texts and their interpretation were all an integral part of imperialism and domination in the colonial phase, and they are today an integral part of the imperialism and domination in the neo-colonial phase. There is a difference. Cultural imperialism which during classical colonialism supplemented direct military and political occupation becomes the major agency of control under neo-colonialism. In support of this claim I want to discuss: (1) literature and society and particularly the role of literature in cultural education; (2) literature and colonization; (3) literature and the national liberation process; and (4) literature and the decolonization of the mind by posing the question: what can be done now in the post-colonial era?

Literature results from conscious acts of men and women in society. Being a product of their intellectual and imaginative activity, it is thoroughly social. The very act of writing, even at the level of the individual, implies social relationship: one is writing about somebody for somebody.