The British journalist Jeremy Harding subtitles his new book, out from Verso, “Notes on the Anti-Colonial Imagination.” It’s a collection of engagements with African writers, photographers, artists, and filmmakers; some of the pieces tango with Europe’s entanglements with Africa.
What does Harding mean by the term “anti-colonial imagination”? Is it a bearded young man? Does it wear cape? Suits? Does it drink tea?
Harding offers no direct answers. In the absence of his definition, we can make an attempt.
First, anti-colonial imagination is a creative faculty that is critical of (and sometimes in opposition to) foreign domination. As a case in point, Harding devotes a chapter to the work of Bertina Lopes and Luís Bernado Honwana, both of whom are Mozambicans. Lopes’s art was featured in We Killed Mangy-Dog, Honwana’s only work of fiction, when it appeared in Portuguese in 1964. A selection of Lopes’s work is printed in Harding’s book (among twenty-plus other photos, all in black and white). Her paintings, which feature figures with dismayed faces lifting an inaudible lament, bear witness to the political oppression of the years of liberation in her country.
Published in translation as part of the African Writers Series in 1969, all seven stories in We Killed Mangy-Dog reveal the deep stratifications that were present in colonial Mozambique. The stories are set in a country on the edge and violence erupts (or is about to) in them. Honwana contrasts the havoc with a suspect tenderness. Laughter ricochets in the book. Not quite joyful outbursts, they are inverted suppresions of rage. But because Honwana’s stories can be perplexing, as Harding recognises, they are misread if and when they are taken as neat allegories.
For instance, what is Mangy-Dog (the hero of the title-story) supposed to represent? The dog, “with his blue eyes full of tears and so big, like someone asking for something without wanting to say it”, is old, ugly, and despised by all. All but Isaura (a girl who is despised, too, because she is not right in the head) and, gradually, Toucinho, the narrator.
Harding’s guess is that Mangy-Dog is “a simulacrum of crumbling Portuguese rule”. I think he is closer to the truth when he says it is “[b]etter to imagine Mangy-Dog and even young Isaura as creations of a heightened realist imagination—and precursors of the Latin American magical realist tradition”.
It’s the stories of Borges that Honwana’s remind me of. The climax, where Toucinho breaks himself to fire the first shot at Mangy-Dog, and to prove his mettle to his gang (which Harding sees as reflecting how class works from the top down), is to me a dramatic tour de force showing how “honour” (a group thing) clashes with one’s sense of self.
Is it possible, then, that the “the anti-colonial imagination” is a catchall for a much more complex way of seeing? Has an aspect been taken to represent the whole?
Elsewhere, a stack of shovels in a photograph by David Goldblatt looks like workers in consult, thinking how they might lead a revolution, or set to work digging apartheid’s grave. In the 1940s, Goldblatt began photographing the mines in the Witwatersrand and those who worked them. The photograph, which was taken in 1966, has the miners in it without them being in it. Harding calls the South African photographer “a master of absence”.
Ernest Cole, whom Harding pairs with Goldblatt ( in “Apartheid in Monochrome”), working with a camera concealed in an incised bag, captured an extensive area of South African society. In House of Bondage (1967), Cole collected his photographs of police checking passes, new recruits at the mines, of the townships being torn down, etc. In the crowded frames, we see Blacks waiting—for passes, for the train that when it arrives is already too full, naked miners with arms raised above their heads during medical examination.
But if Goldblatt and Cole are critical of white minority rule, the same cannot be said of the Malian Seydou Keita nor the Burkinabe Sonlé Sory, for whom photography was primarily a trade. Those who visited the elaborate studios Sory and Keita constructed—Harding calls them, wonderfully, “theatres of aspiration”—came because they needed to see themselves revealed in a new light.
Harding uses the term “post-colonial” in “The West African Photographer’s Studio”, his piece on Sory and Keita. (Is there a “postcolonial imagination”? Is it related by blood to the anti-colonial one?) He writes, “Even Sory’s demure sitters are shot with a kind of nonchalance—a matter-of-fact manner that suggests his knowingness in relation to the poverty in postcolonial Haute Volta. Pretend to be prosperous, he seems to be saying to his subjects, even though it will take years to prosper after more than half a century of colonial rule.”
But is that reading (in the section I italicised) correct? Or has the critic enforced a meaning? Does Sory really “seem to be saying” any such thing about colonialism or is Harding anxious to make him out to be?
Point is: Harding sees colonialism everywhere, and not as a passive-something. It is an active element for him—like a rumour, but potent enough with treachery—even where it is obviously not. This is the second form which that imagination takes: colonialism is seen in a more totalizing way than is behoved by the facts. Africa is constantly and unremittingly defined against the backdrop of European rule. We cannot believe that it is free.
The result of this disposition is an anxiety of inference which manifests as a tendency to presume.
Harding is very sensitive to the ways in which Africa (analogue and pre-analogue) is still being contested today, specifically in European museums. And I am not arguing that Africa is not still working out its salvation, in some sense, “in the shadow of the old order”. “Objects from Africa displayed in galleries leave visitors uneasy,” he writes in “A Visitor’s Guide to Three Museums” (the British Museum, the Quai Branly, and the AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, Belgium).
The “unease” Harding speaks of has a number of causes. There’s the “illegitimacy” of the presence of these “objects” in Europe, and for the French, British, or Belgian visitor, a sense of culpability. There’s the fact that the artefacts may be sacred things, gods in trapped glass, exiles; making spectacles of them, to some, may seem profane. But there’s unease centrally because the things don’t have settled names. “Objects”? Not quite. “Artefacts”? No. “Art”? You say? And because they are not nameable, they are difficult to categorise.
The British Museum, in search of a solution, when it opened the Sainsbury Africa Galleries in 2001, decided to display creditable contemporary African art alongside those from pre-analogue times. “It is a proper, and properly political, strategy,” Harding writes of the decision:
“to preface the big rooms we’re about to enter with a clutch of works whose attribution to individuals or workshops is certain. It alerts us to the likelihood that styles of popular art and more elaborate forms of homage (to notables and ancestors) were never entirely a matter of transcendent aesthetic consensus. Better, surely, to imagine competition between rival schools and individuals. . . This, after all, is how it is in many parts of the continent now.”
In some form, Harding may be right. But once we have granted that, “rival schools” still remains a stretch. Harding “imagines” how he does precisely because he has his country’s art history to go by. No way of ascertaining that it is “better, surely”.
Moreover, the suggestion that it may have been the case because “This, after all, is how it is in many parts of the continent now” is a surprising glitch in a critic who writes in his essay on the rise of French ethnography—“Report from Sirius B: Colonial Curiosity on the Rampage”—that African societies “were adaptive, permeable, alert to constant changes that their investigators couldn’t afford to ignore—including colonial penetration”. (He was relating French expeditionist Michel Leiris’s view, but with approval.) The same critic writes as if that adaptive process never took place, so that whatever we see now across the continent surely must have been that way all along.
It is more than a glitch when, some paragraphs later, Harding goes on to say a Benin royal mask (Queen Idia’s) has “the hint of Tudor impassivity” (understandable) and that that “reminds us” that the period 1564 in Europe and in Africa “was roughly the same” (how?).
In 2013, Binyavanga Wainaina was on Al Jazeera and refused to blame colonialism for the moral bankrupty of Africa’s big men. To look back and harangue the ghost, Wainaina said, is to go “looking for a kind of victimhood that’s not helpful. Take the person who’s stolen from the till and arrest him”.
In response, Harding writes, “He [Wainaina] was imagining a western model of accountability that would transfer fluently to regimes in Africa, where many judicial systems, unlike those in the US or Europe, lacked the resources or the clout to prosecute wayward politicians.”
What Harding’s comment has glossed over, of course, is why African systems lack “the resources or the clout” that would ensure accountability. Does that have anything to do with foreign rule? Or are we unfortunate to have very despicable people at the helm of affairs? As Wainaina said, it is the latter, because in the final analysis it is African men who sign papers. But Harding, himself an anti-colonialist (though undeclared), cannot bring himself to acknowledge the obvious.
It is possible that you did not catch the word Harding used to describe corrupt officials and self-tenured presidents: “wayward politicians”. Wayward, an adjective chosen to muffle judgement: they are children, these money launderers; it’s a perversion, an uncomfortable appetite is what they have.
Keep that “harmless” phrase in mind as you read his condemnation of Europe and the US: “As a personification of western attitudes and policy decisions around the world, whiteness has begun to look as ruthless as it did in [Lewis] Nkosi’s day [1965].” This is followed by a list of “atrocities”: the wars in the Middle East, Europe and the US’s hesitation to take on immigrants, the events that triggered the Black Lives Matter protests, and so on.
Harding, who often ensures that his convictions keep a low profile within pointed sentences, here deploys strong words. But it is impossible, I believe, even for Harding, to believe that the relationship between Blacks and Whites in the United States today is the same or even close to what it was before or in the immediate years after Selma. Nor does he believe that wars waged for political ends (however foolish or misguided) are enough to judge the moral fiber of a nation.
The wonder is, if these things are so clearly contrary to reason, why he does say them.
One thinks of Jean-Paul Sartre and the curse of the solidarizing impulse—Sartre who put his name behind the devastating, execrable logic of Frantz Fanon, his vision of violence as the only cure to the ills of colonialism, in The Wretched of the Earth: “Read Fanon,” Sartre said to his white readers, “you will learn how, in the period of their helplessness, their mad impulse to murder is” (not evil but) “the expression of the natives’ collective unconscious.” (A form of aesthetic impulse, eh?)
No surprise, then, that in “This Site Is Under Construction”, Harding’s notes on Albert Camus, the Algerian war of independence, and the split among French intellectuals in the fifties (famously between Sartre and Camus), while he is sympathetic towards Camus’s position, his verdict falls in favour of the French existentialist philosopher who “remained a dogged anti-colonialist”.
Years before the debate, which had at its core the question of violence and its “legitimate” use in a revolution, Camus had published The Stranger (1942), where a French settler kills an unnamed Arab. In 2013, Kamel Daoud published his version of the classic.
The Meursault Investigation is the story of the murdered Arab’s family and of Algeria (during the war of independence and after), told by his brother, Harun. The novel balances scales. But it is equally a critique of the Algerian brand of anti-colonialism and the logic that underpinned it (the same logic championed by Fanon).
Like Camus’s protagonist, Harun also kills a man. While Meursault goes on trial for being a terrible son, Harun is on trial for killing at the wrong time, on the other side of history. “‘This Frenchman, you should have killed him with us, during the war, not last week!’ I didn’t see what difference that made, I replied. Visibly taken aback, [the colonel] was silent for a while, and then he roared, ‘It makes all the difference!’”
In 2015 to 2016, when over a thousand women were assaulted in Cologne, Germany, by men reported to be immigrants from North Africa, Daoud, a journalist prior to his hit novel, penned two pieces (in Le Monde and the New York Times) where he noted that Arab societies are sexually repressive; this is a fact European nations cannot afford to close their eyes to.
There was a reaction, including one from Jeremy Harding’s colleague at the London Review of Books Adam Shatz who felt Daoud’s critique of Arab societies was like handing Muslims over to the ultra-right section of Europe. Daoud took a break from journalism afterwards but has returned. He now writes a regular column for Le Point arguing that Europe must assimilate new immigrants.
In a postscript to “This Site Is Under Construction”, Harding comes very close to calling the Algerian writer a sellout: “Daoud by now was a grand inquisitor, probing for ambivalence in Europe’s minority populations. His questions were thinly disguised beneath his rhetoric. Are you loyal, assimilated members of your host communities, as I am, or are you prey to the siren call of the anti-colonial imagination? From Africa. From Gaza. Can you have it both ways?”
There is nothing wrong, one might say, with loyalty. Moreover, in 2015 (before the affaire), Daoud had made it clear: “I don’t like it when people decide for me in my place. I claim total sovereignity in the palace of my language.” Indeed, his columns were published in 2017 as Mes Indépendances—my independences.
But independence? Independences? Yours? Anti-colonialists struggle with letting one have that. Be it Sartre or Harding, they like to demand solidarity at the expense of the individual and his own view of things.
Lest I leave you with the impression that I dislike Analogue Africa—to the contrary, I find it very stimulating. Harding is solid on the historical milieu of the artists whose work he handles. His essay on the French-Guadeloupean filmmaker Sarah Maldoror is thorough; he is just as searching in his pieces on the South African William Kentridge and the Ghanaian-British John Akomfrah.
Without ignoring his presumptions, the pictures and paintings he glances at also hold our attention a little more after we have read him. He says nothing about poetry or music. As compensation, he provides a playlist, songs to listen to as you readbrowse each section.
All told, whether we be anti-colonialists or sellouts, Jeremy Harding has done us a service. E
