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Hegel in African Literature: Achebe’s Answer

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2024

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o  and
Eunice Njeri Sahle
Ngugi Wa Thiong'o
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
Eunice Njeri Sahle
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Extract

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The colonial project has three interrelated facets. It is at once a practice; a body of knowledge; and a technology for mind change, or simply mental engineering. Decolonization is necessarily a negation of the three-in-one character of the colonial process, to produce a third possibility: independence, liberation and social justice. Colonialism as mind-engineering results from colonialism as practice and text but it also aids them. Mind-engineering is directly the result of colonialism as text, for the colonial text is simultaneously a boost to the minds behind colonizing practices and a prison house for the mind of the colonized. The battle between the colonial text and its dialectical opposite, the anti-colonial text, is central to the entire process of decolonization. Achebe and Hegel exemplify this.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 51 , Issue 2 , May 2004 , pp. 63 - 67
Copyright
Copyright © ICPHS 2004

Footnotes

1.

This is part of an ongoing project by the two authors on Hegelianism in African literary and political Thought.

References

Notes

2. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, London, Heinemann, 1958.

3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, trans. J. Sibree, The Philosophy of History, New York, Dover, 1956.

4. Ibid., p. 93.

5. Ibid., p. 28.

6. Ibid., p. 93.

7. Ibid., p. 94.

8. Ibid., p. 95.

9. Ibid., p. 18. What is one to do with Ethiopian and Eritrean societies in which the Christian faith has shaped cultural, political and economic arrangements for centuries? In the Hegelian world these are in ‘Africa proper’ south of the Sahara.

10. Ibid., p. 29, pp. 47-9.

11. Ibid., p. 91.

12. Ibid., p. 99.

13. Ibid., p. 93.

14. Ibid., p. 99. Hegel declares that Egypt ‘does not belong to African Spirit’ [ibid.] and the historical development of the other societies in this region is neither Asiatic or European and as for the rest of the continent, what he calls ‘Africa proper’ is the ‘Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature …’ [ibid.]. This view continues to be reproduced and one need look no further than the extensive literature that continues to present and search for ‘scientific evidence’ to demonstrate the non-African origins of Egyptian society.

15. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and The Last Man, New York, The Free Press, 1992, p. 56.

16. Ibid.

17. G. W. F. Hegel, trans. A. V. Miller, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1979. In paras 13-31, he discusses the struggle for recognition between a master and a slave and concludes that it is through this kind of long-fought social struggle that we become historical beings. Achebe's Okonkwo demonstrates the struggles and contradictions that are the pillars of historical development in their finest form.

18. Achebe's work continues to challenge the Hegelian view of Africa in the wake of independence, a period marked by the rise of authoritarian politics. See, for instance, his Anthills of the Savannah.