Seminar 2000

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An Alternative Education: Indigenous Knowledge in Laye's Dark Child

For example, a text often critiqued for its idyllic childhood perspective and its structural deficiencies is Camara Laye's The Dark Child. Like G.N. Marete, some critics argue that Laye's weakness lies in the non-confrontational development from child to adult within the text, so that its narrative appears to be a presentation of nostalgia. As Marete notes "characters (except for the narrator), landscape and the entire world of the novel remain almost static" (95). Yet, from another perspective, such as Odora's, Laye's novel confronts many of her concerns and addresses how to reconstitute subjugated knowledge. In Chapter One, Laye explains the spiritual power to which his ancestors and his father subscribe. In Chapter Two, Laye describes in lyrical detail the craft of goldsmithing practiced by the father. In Chapter Three, Laye playfully elaborates on the games young adults engage in the tiny village of Tindican, French Guinea. In Chapter Four Laye portrays the working traditions during rice harvest in his community. In Chapter Five, Laye examines the magician-like gifts of his mother. In Chapter Six, Laye elaborates on his French schooling. In Chapter Seven, he tells about the magnificent ceremony of lions, a coming of age ritual for young men. In Chapter Eight, he gives details of the circumcision rite, which as he says in the first sentence is "a really dangerous ordeal, and not game" (111).

In Chapters Nine through Twelve, only one-third of the book, Laye proceeds to move away from the indigenous knowledges he describes to the confrontation of western ways which threaten the survival of this knowledge and way of life. With Odora's conclusions in mind, his text stands as one of the few early texts in African Literature which values indigenous knowledge enough so that it becomes immortalized in a non-oral tradition. Laye's school years at a technical college, known as Ecole George Poiret, are peppered with insights into his own conflict between education and his earliest experiences. He misses his little hut, his family and friends; he develops an ulcer at school and endures the school year as it "passed slowly, very slowly" (155). For the whole three years of school, time away from Kouroussa was an exile. Following the exams at Conakry, Laye is invited to go to France to finish his studies. His father's attitudes and feelings, which suggest that he is in favor of this new development, are contrasted with his mother's who resists this new educational opportunity and weeps at the loss of her son. As Laye writes, "All the time she had been talking and fighting against them she must have been watching the wheels going round and round . . ." (186). These wheels she imagines turning are the forward momentum of another culture. She angrily describes their menacing ways, "Those people are never satisfied. They want to have everything. As soon as they set eyes on something they want it for themselves" (186).

Indigenous Environmental Knowledge and Economic Power: Nwapa's Efuru

Among the well-known critiques of lost knowledge, is Vandana Shiva's Monocultures of the Mind. Her 1993 text on the risks of biotechnology for the Third World is a classic among many environmentalists and educational leaders alike. Her theoretical background as a physicist has allowed her to become a foremost critic on environmental dangers to local knowledge systems. She is adamantly against societies, which are not "being modeled on the forest as is the case of forest cultures," and model themselves after the assembly lines in the factory (19). Her stance evokes memories of more organic, cultural and bio diverse communities within the Western Hemisphere in earlier times and evokes strong passions among those individuals who still try to maintain their diversity in the Eastern Hemisphere. Shiva's argument runs as follows: first, local knowledge is made to disappear by negating it; second, the dominant systems of knowledge argue their superiority over localized traditions; and third, local knowledge is delegitimatized through low status adjectives such as primitive and unscientific. Environmentally, monocultures replace diverse agricultures and biotechnology replaces local traditions of growing foods.

Many African novels offer excellent investigations into the power of indigenous knowledge, such as two, coming of age novels I will teach this fall Ngugi's The River Between and Weep Not, Child. However, in this paper I will use Flora Nwapa's Efuru as my example. In this story, Efuru's power as a female resides in three sources: her ability to trade, her faith in the river goddess, and her respect for societal rules. Among the three sources, Efuru's ability to trade is crucial to her remaining faithful to her belief in the river goddess and equally as important for her to remain respectful towards societal rules. While she is born into a high ranking social family, which provides her with immediate social value, her story is about keeping her social capital through her own economic success. Rather than marrying a man to retain her social claims, Efuru prefers to demonstrate her skill in trading to prove her societal worth.

Throughout the story, Efuru insists upon her ability to trade. Within the first four pages of the text, the reader learns that Efuru has refused to go with her new husband to the farm and proclaims that she is not cut out for farm work. She states emphatically that "I am going to trade." (10). In Chapter two, Efuru and her husband have already made a huge profit: first in yams, then in crayfish. Despite the travails of thievery, rough waters, and a risky profit margin, which other local people encounter, Efuru navigates successfully through these obstacles. Over time, she returns to her trade when her husband fails at farming and her child turns three years old. After she has been deserted by him, she returns to her father's house and wants to continue her trade. Eventually, she becomes so renown for her business savvy that she is sought out by suitors, like Eneberi, for her prowess. As one of the married men notes, "Her hands are made of money. If she sells pepper in the market, she will make money out of it. If in salt, money will flow in" (125). She is able to make money out of anything just like her mother.

Arguably, Efuru's economic successes, along with her self-confidence, allow her to make substantial choices about her life. For example, when she chooses her first husband, a man without the means for a dowry, Efuru decides to marry him anyway and, notably, without her father's approval. When villagers gossip about her willfulness, she decides that they are not important to her future and ignores there foreboding threats. Although Efuru is immensely successful financially, she decides with whom she will be generous. She gives abundantly to the Nwosu family and decides not to hound them about their debt. Yet, her sister-in-law tries to insist that she collect money from her debtors. Adizua begins to miss meals at home and Efuru decides that she will not cook for him. Even as a young girl, Efuru wants to get an education and she decides that she will go to school with a friend who is able to send her. Following, Efuru's second marriage, she decides to leave Eneberi, because he unjustly accuses her of adultery.

In each of these examples, Efuru makes decisions for herself, even when she receives advice to the contrary. She is a woman who, regardless of the changes around her, still retains her identity and knows her mind (see Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye's poem "for Miriam"). Her economic power provides her with an independence that makes it possible for her to act on her own desires and impulses. And, when she is pushed too far, as is the case when her first husband has not slept with her for six months, she states, "there is a limit to human endurance. I am a human being "(53). She points out that her husband has treated her unjustifiably like a slave. In time, she decides to leave him and return to her father's house. Like the character Mustafa in Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North, who rejects his western education and uses his London economics degree to develop a suitable market in his hometown, Efuru follows her instincts for economic success and ultimately is able to extend her sense of agency into tangible acts of independence. Also, like Mustafa, she chooses to cultivate her indigenous knowledge in order to sustain herself and the members in her community.

Problematizing the Bildungsroman as a Coming of Age Story about Education

In examining these various coming of age stories, it has been useful to take a critical look at how education affects the lives of young people. In the end, it is not a universal certainty that education is good, either in the sense of providing the means for a good life or in the sense of improving the human condition. From the perspective of the well-known Kenyan writer, scholar, and teacher, Mecere Mugo, education includes political activism to keep the human mind awake (see "The South End of a North-South Writers' Dialogue: Two Letters from a Postcolonial Feminist "Exmatriate"). In the 1998 text, Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures, Madhu Prakash and Gustavo Esteva argue from another perspective. The authors make a case against education as a human right and promote ways of escaping education. As they write, their book "celebrates well-being: still enjoyed in the commons and cultures of peoples living and learning at the grassroots" (xi). Like the examples Prakash and Esteva present in their book, these coming of age stories appear to wrestle with the conflicts which education brings into the relations of African people as they interact with a variety of spaces. Among the many texts on the list presented earlier, it takes readers but a brief moment to identify educational issues. From Armah's The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, the passage about Aboliga the Frog and the manchild describes to the brief cycle between childhood and adulthood. As Armah suggests to his readers, the manchild represents the short life of his native Ghana, a concern he combines in the book with aspects of education and corruption. In Dangarembga' Nervous Conditions, and Emechta's The Bride Price criticism is directed toward the trade-offs for women who become educated in the western tradition. Education often means loss in social capital, a loss which researchers, such as Basil Bernstein, find more devastating for third world countries than the loss of economic capital.

In Laye's The Dark Child, the protagonist cannot come to terms with the loss of his traditional African education. The final third of the book highlights the difficulty in separating learning within the village of Koroussa, French Guinea, from the education in Conakry and France. In strong affective terms, Laye writes,

And so one day I took a plane for France. Oh! It was a terrible parting! I do not like to think of it. I can still hear my mother wailing. I can still see my father, unable to hide his tears. I can still see my sister, my brothers. . . No, I do like to remember that parting. It was if I were torn apart." (186-7)

Laye's description speaks about the act of tearing apart in language that incorporates all the five senses. So here, there is a potential educational gain in terms of western perspectives, but, simultaneously, Laye reminds readers of the emotional cost, a cost too great for an individual with a firmly rooted, local, community perspective.

In Nwapa's Efuru, Efuru's self-knowledge is the kind of education that is not gained necessarily in schools. She learns from her own acts of independence and as she has experiences, particularly in the market place, she learns to trust in her ability to act responsibly. However, for Efuru the challenge lies in her learning to live independently without a man and also without the status of motherhood. As a result, Efuru remains a symbol of successful matriarchal power, but her life without a husband and children also suggests to readers that she does so at some cost to her in terms of other traditional values. While Nwapa makes little of Efuru's education within the home of a woman who herself goes to school when only a few women were allowed to attend, an alert reader can make connections between Efuru's intellectual power and the education in this home. Was it this education which enabled Efuru to become economically successful, and was this ability at issue, when she looses her two husbands and her only three year-old child?

In concluding this paper on coming of age stories in African Literature, I have argued that coming of age stories, as a group, demonstrate the problems between educational aims and the social, cultural, political, and economic values of African societies. In these books, which have been mentioned, individuals mature to adulthood via deeply conflicting educational experiences. What Davies provides is a transnational paradigm to focus on black presences, located in various locations and attached to a variety of cultural identities. The explanatory power of her paradigm, as applied to literature, relates directly to the theories promoted by Uwakwek in literary criticism, Odora in the social sciences, and Shiva and Esteva in environmental education. These researchers have found methods to challenge unicentricity and to investigate ways in which local, indigenous knowledge is part of education. More particularly, they examine ideas, which help scholars to contest unicentric assumptions behind the Bildungsroman, a genre that has little to do with investigating the subjugation of indigenous knowledge, indigenous learning styles, and indigenous environmental knowledge. As a result, their research bears heavily on redefining coming of age stories in African Literature, in order to consider the symbolic significance of literature which speaks of the "(wo)manchild." The boy, Aboliga the Frog, is on to something far more contentious than he ever imagined and far more significant than what his Standard Five friends considered the "freaks and oddities."

Armah, Ayi Kwie. (1968). The Beautiful Ones are Not Yet Born. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Chesoni, Atsango. (1995). "A Coming of Age Poem, a Story Untold" in International Dimensions of Black Women's Writing. Eds. Carole Joyce Bruce and 'Molara Ogundipe-Leslie. New York University Press, 201-202.

Dangarembga, Tsitsi. (1988). Nervous Conditions. Seattle, Washington: The Seal Press.

Davies, Carol Boyce. (1999). "Beyond Unicentricity: Transcultural Black Presence's." Research in African Literature, (30) 2, 96-109.

Emechta, Buchi. (1976). The Bride Price. New York: George Braziller.

Laye, Cmara. (1954). The Dark Child. New York: Noonday Press.

Macgoye, Marjorie Olude. (1995). "For Miriam." in The Heinemann Book of African Women's Poetry. Eds. Stella and Frank Chipasula. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 118-120.

Marete. G.N. (1998). "Absence of Conflict in Maturation in The African Child." in Childhood in African Literature. Eds. Eldred Durosimi Jones and Majorie Jones. Trenton, New Jersey: African World Press, 91-101.

Mugo, Micere. (1998). "The South End of a North-South Writers' Dialogue: Two Letters from a Postcolonial Feminist 'Exmatriate'" in Challenging Hierarchies. Eds. Leonard Podis and Yakubu Saaka. New York: Peter Lang, 63-83.

Ngugi, Wa Thiongo. (1965). The River Between. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.

_____. (1964). Weep Not, Child. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Nwapa, Flora. (1966). Efuru. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Odora, Catherine. "Educating African Girls in a Context of Patriarchy and Transformation." Masters Thesis.

Prakash, Madhu Suri and Esteva, Gustava. (1998) Escaping Education: Living as Learning within Grassroots Cultures. New York: Peter Lang.

Salih, Tayeb. (1969). Season of Migration to the North. Boulder, Colorado: Three Continents Press.

Shiva, Vandana. (1993). Monocultures of the Mind. New Jersey: Zed Books.

Uwakwek, Pauline Ada. (1998). "Carving a Niche: Visions of Gendered Childhood in Buchi Emechta's The Bride Price and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions." in Childhood in African Literature. Eds. Eldred Durosimi Jones and Marjorie Jones. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 9-21.

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