Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Here, There, and Everywhere: Modernity in Question
- 1 (Im)possible Necessities: Reading an African Formation in Contradiction
- 2 Imperial Exchanges, Postimperial Reconfigurations: Africa in the Modern, the Modern in Africa
- 3 “Worlding” Nativity: Early Gold Coast Culturalist Imperatives and Nationalist Initiatives
- 4 On the Road to Ghana: Negotiations, Paradoxes, Pratfalls
- 5 Faust in Africa: Genealogy of a “Messenger Class”
- 6 Black Orpheus; or the (Modernist) Return of the Native: J. E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound
- 7 Prometheus Unbound: Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah
- Postscript Ethical Transnationalism, Postcolonialism, the Black Atlantic: Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa vis-à-vis the Contemporary Revisionisms
- Abbreviated Titles
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
5 - Faust in Africa: Genealogy of a “Messenger Class”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 March 2023
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Here, There, and Everywhere: Modernity in Question
- 1 (Im)possible Necessities: Reading an African Formation in Contradiction
- 2 Imperial Exchanges, Postimperial Reconfigurations: Africa in the Modern, the Modern in Africa
- 3 “Worlding” Nativity: Early Gold Coast Culturalist Imperatives and Nationalist Initiatives
- 4 On the Road to Ghana: Negotiations, Paradoxes, Pratfalls
- 5 Faust in Africa: Genealogy of a “Messenger Class”
- 6 Black Orpheus; or the (Modernist) Return of the Native: J. E. Casely Hayford’s Ethiopia Unbound
- 7 Prometheus Unbound: Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah
- Postscript Ethical Transnationalism, Postcolonialism, the Black Atlantic: Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa vis-à-vis the Contemporary Revisionisms
- Abbreviated Titles
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Tyger Tyger burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry.
—William Blake, “The Tyger,” Songs of Innocence and ExperienceLet us help one another to find a way out of Darkest Africa. The impenetrable jungle around us is not darker than the dark primeval forest of the human mind uncultured. We must emerge from the savage backwoods and come into the open where nations are made.
—Attoh Ahuma, The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness[In 1977] I told [my third year English class at the University of Nairobi] … “I want to attempt a class analysis of Chinua Achebe's fiction from Things Fall Apart to Girls at War. I want … to trace the development of the messenger class from its inception as actual messengers, clerks, soldiers and road foremen in colonialism as seen in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, to their position as the educated ‘been-tos’ in No Longer at Ease; to their assumption and exercise of power in A Man of the People; to their plunging of the nation into intra-class civil war in Girls at War.”
—Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the MindSons and Fathers; Or, Locating the Present in the Future Anterior of the Past
Introducing the Picador collection of his first three novels in 1988—the collection goes by the title The African Trilogy—Chinua Achebe steps back for one reflexive moment to make a candid observation about his relation to his father. Recalling that the man was “a devout evangelist,” Achebe reveals a father whose wholehearted devotion to the brave new white dispensation, introduced by the colonial encounter, was matched by an iron resolution to make a clean break with his traditional Igbo past. As far as the novelist can recall, he “never divulged to me before he passed on” the “sensational masquerade dancing” that he did “before he renounced the devil and all his works” (xi). The devil and all his works: this language we will surely recognize as one whose inscription and meaning appear in the very order of colonialist diagnosis, which, as divulged in the last chapter, contrives to impose on Africa her burden of worldlessness.
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- Writing Ghana, Imagining AfricaNation and African Modernity, pp. 174 - 203Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2004