Abstract
This chapter discusses the representation of decolonization in the works of Jagjit Singh and Kuldip Sondhi, and the politics underlying such representation, by examining four topical questions that have preoccupied the writers: the scapegoating of the Asian diaspora through the use of stereotype in the era of independence, the idea of the nation-as-one, the nationalist politics of “integration” and the marginalization of the diaspora by the new states after independence. For reasons elucidated in the course of the chapter, these questions have been of great concern within Asian communities in East Africa and are thus given a salient place in the literature under scrutiny. The centrality of these questions in the works to be examined has very much to do with the ascendance of a narrowly nativist approach to national politics in the era of independence. The exclusivist claim to national belonging that is at the heart of nativism has a history that is traceable to the logic of colonialism whose manicheism it reproduces. Given its parochial approach to the meaning of citizenship, there are very good reasons for writers to look askance at nativism. Yet all too often, critiques of indigenism turn into blanket dismissals of anti-colonial nationalism, or pretexts for the undermining of anti-imperialist stances on culture and politics. The same could be said for ostensibly radical critiques of elite nationalism, which have, in the words of Neil Lazarus, provided the pretext for critics “to disavow nationalism tout court.“1
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Notes
Neil Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism and the Problematic Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourses.” Research in African Literatures 24, 4 (1993), 70.
Ranajit Guha, “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies I. Writings on South Asian History and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986), 4. Declan Kiberd has also noted of nationalism that it is normally “a broad and comprehensive movement, containing progressive as well as conservative elements.”
Declain Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Vintage, 1996), 642.
Kwame Anthony Appiah and Paul Gilroy are notable examples of the former tendency while Arun Mukherjee and Christopher Miller are representatives of the latter. See Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Arun Mukherjee, Oppositional Aesthetics; and Christopher Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Terry Eagleton “Nationalism: Irony and Commitment,” 23. This position is shared by Aijaz Ahmad who, although wary of nationalism’s potential for chauvinism and violence notes that “a blanket contempt for all nationalisms tends to slide over the question of imperialism. I think that those who are fighting against imperialism cannot just forego their nationalism. They have to go through it, transform their nation-state in tangible ways, and then arrive at the other side.” “Culture, Nationalism, and the Role of Intellectuals,” Interview with Erika Repovz and Nikolai Jeffs, in Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (eds.), In Defence of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), 54.
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). For Fanon, “The settler and the native are old acquaintances. In fact, the settler is right when he speaks of knowing ‘them’ very well. For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence” (36).
Ambu Patel, Struggle for ‘Release Jomo & His Colleagues’ (Nairobi: New Kenya Publishers, 1963). Agehananda Bharati has described it as “a pathetic little book which contains well over a hundred statements of varying length, by such very different people as Ashok Mehta, Oginga Odinga, Indira Gandhi, and a motley symposium of East African Indian leaders, businessmen of stature, etc.” The Asians in East Africa, 332–333.
Tom Mboya, Freedom and After (London: Andre Deutsch, 1963), 61–62.
Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?,” in Homi Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990), 11.
Jagjit Singh, “Portrait of an Asian as an East African,” in David Cook and David Rubadiri (eds.), Poems From East Africa (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1972). Further references are in the text.
As many scholars have tried to argue, African nationalism is not a uniformly bourgeois formation as some have presented it. Nationalism in Africa has borne the interests of widely disparate social groups, even if nationalist elites might seem to be most evident in its constitution. See, for instance, Norma Kriger, Zimbabwe’s Guerrilla War: Peasant Voices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Neil Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization,”
and Terence Ranger, Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War in Zimbabwe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985).
Langston Hughes, “I, Too, Sing America,” in Langston Hughes and Ama Bontemps (eds.), The Poetry Of The Negro, 1746–1949 (New York: Doubleday, 1949), 97.
Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), 297–298.
Jagjit Singh, “Sweet Scum of Freedom,” in Gwyneth Henderson (ed.), African Theatre (London: Heinemann, 1973). Further references are in the text.
For a study of the prostitute figure in African writing, see Fikeni E. M. K. Senkoro, The Prostitute in African Literature (Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press, 1982).
Wole Soyinka, “The Writer in A Modern African State,” in Per Wastberg (ed.), The Writer in Modern Africa (Uppsala: The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1968), 20.
Kuldip Sondhi, “Undesignated.” In David Cook and Miles Lee (eds.), Short East African Plays in English (Nairobi: Heinemann, 1968). Further references are in the text.
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© 2013 Dan Ojwang
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Ojwang, D. (2013). Romancing Decolonization. In: Reading Migration and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137262967_8
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