Soyinka, Mahfouz, Zuglool and hazards of critical scholarship in African literature

The publication by Gerald Moore of his Seven African Writers, in 1962 marked the genesis of what later turned out to be the institutionalization of African literary criticism. There have since been literary assessments, evaluations, estimations, deflations, deconstructions, reconstructions, comparisons, and other forms of judgmental undertakings in connection with African literature. However, the volume and quality of critical literary scholarship in African literature today falls far below expectation especially in view of the proliferation of creative works and imaginative books on the continent. Tony Afejuku, a distinguished scholar-poet and Professor of African Literature at the University of Benin recently argued that African literary criticism is “still elementary” and further remarked that “the corpus of creative, imaginative works and books known today in the domain of established African literature far outnumbers the body of valuable criticism,… in terms of books (or handbooks) claiming originality, to the literature of contemporary African literary criticism.” Afejuku further remarks that “Today, in Africa, we seem to have far more writers than critics.”

However, the present writer ventures to state that while this assertion is obviously true of Nigeria, it may not be true of other geographical entities in Africa especially the Arabic-speaking settings. I wonder if the characterisation “African Literature” or “African Literary Criticism” has always been intended as inclusive of North Africa and the Maghrib.

With the somewhat unwieldy size of the continent, it may not be easy to attain an appreciable level of accuracy in generalised literary analyses at all times, unless the continent is classified into regions or sub-regions, for easy contextualization. Yet, I shall further demonstrate that both where the claim is true and untrue on the African Continent, certain hazards are associated with literary criticism especially at literarily rural as against intellectually cosmopolitan setting.

In pursuing this task, I shall rely appreciably on the experience of these two African Noble Laureates and illustrate with specific experiences from the scholarship of Mustapha Zuglool, a foremost Nigerian Arabic writer who represents the tradition of Naguib Mahfouz in Southwestern Nigeria, where Wole Soyinka belongs.

Wole Soyinka and Naguib Mahfouz are the two African writers who have won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. While Soyinka is a Nigerian, born a Christian and strongly associated with the Western Literary Tradition, Naguib Mahfouz was an Egyptian Muslim, and of the Arabic and Middle-Eastern Literary Tradition. It should be pointed out that the geographical location at which these two literary icons meet is African Literary Criticism. Where does Mustapha Zuglool belong in the present scheme of analysis? He shares few commonalities with each of the two African Laureates. For instance he, like Soyinka, is a Nigerian and a foremost writer, and a highly influential user of language. Similarly, he, like Naquib Mahfouz, is a Muslim who cultivated the scholarly orientations of the Middle-East and therefore has Arabic as his mode of expression. At the time of his death on July 5, 2017, he was arguably the most prolific and most intellectually endowed Arabic writer in Southwestern Nigeria, the ancestral origin of Wole Soyinka.

It is not premature to state at this juncture that significant parts of the so-called hazards of literary criticism are themselves among the hazards of critical performance in any genre of African Literature. This line of thinking finds support in James Baldwin’s words in The New York Times Book Review (January 14, 1962, p. 1) that one cannot attain eminence in creative writing or imaginative scholarship especially novel without “attempting to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, and then a little more”. David Ker has rightly interpreted this as meaning “attacking what society tends to hold sacred, in order that reality be confronted and constructively altered” It is in their attempts to alter social constructions by affecting readers’ consciousness and conscience that Wole Soyinka, Naguib Mahfouz, and in their own way, Mustapha Zuglool and few of his notable disciples, earned wraths in certain quarters, as shall be demonstrated shortly.

To the two Laureates, the role of a creative writer as a freedom fighter is unmistakable. Christopher Okigbo demonstrated this so eloquently when, during the Nigerian Civil War, he stopped writing poetry and took to running guns until he died on the battlefield. Okigbo’s experience was later characterised by Achebe as a creative undertaking. Achebe sees as creative “any activity engaged in by a creative writer”, thereby dismissing as half-truth “the belief that creativity is something that must come from a kind of contemplation, quite or repose and that it is difficult to keep the artistic integrity of one’s writing while being totally involved in political situations”.

As regards Soyinka, he unequivocally connects critical literary scholarship to social change where he states that the greatest handicap to development of Nigerian writing was the lack of a “really fearless but very honest and intelligent critical forum’, adding that “a critic’s job is not merely to review an existing piece of work but also to create an atmosphere of appreciation, of tolerance, to cultivate an experimental attitude not only in writers, but in the audience” Soyinka did not equivocate in berating lazy and passive critics who “manipulate” the minds of their audience or followers towards “rejecting what seems strange” Soyinka believes strongly that “if the writer feels committed or involved or he feels a compulsion within himself to write the truth, then he surely has the right to try and build the kind of society in which he can write this beautiful literature, these beautiful words”. This is an unveiled call on the writer to move a step beyond the provision of ideological vision through creative writing for social change, by engaging in direct political action as was the case with Christopher Okigbo.

The natural outcome of such an experience was later described in Soyinka’s A Shuttle in the Crypt which is a pen portrait of his twenty-five month incarceration following his open pronouncement upon the anti-people policies of the Federal Government of Nigeria under General Yakubu Gowon. At the twilight of the Nigeria-Biafra War, Soyinka travelled to the rebels’ camp for the purpose of peace-making. However, he was jailed by the Gowon administration for daring to traverse the warring borders at such a time. Yet Soyinka condemned the human wastage occasioned by the war.

In The Man Died which was a product of his prison notes, Soyinka demonstrated the need for revolution by remarking that such an experience is a test of the people themselves, “a test of those who claim to think on behalf of the people and a gauge of the potential for the only kind of political action which I foresee, with no alternative.” This line of thinking about creative writing and social change caused Soyinka persecutions in the form of irreparable losses as well as assassination attempts including that which he narrowly escaped by disguising like a hunter across the forest, during General Sani Abacha’s dictatorship. It is this area of assassination attempts that marked the meeting point between the hazards of his own activities as a critic and those of Naguib Mahfouz.

The two Laureates, it should be noted were two outspoken, unrepentantly critical and highly influential writers of their time and age in their respective environment. Like Soyinka’ Ake or Ibadan: The Penkelemesi Years, Mahfouz’s half-century of work, rich in detail, is characteristically a pen portrait of some aspects of life in teeming working-class neighborhoods in Cairo. The picture painted of the city involved in each of two writers’ work may be compared to Dickens’s London or Zola’s Paris.

For a very long time in Cairo, Mahfouz had been an endangered species and after his publication of Awlad Haratna (Children of the Alley), he became a target for assassination by Islamists. In the words of Muhammad Salmawy, his journalist friend who delivered his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Mahfouz was getting in a car with his friend who was a doctor to go meet some friends when a young man approached him. Salmawy said Mahfouz thought the man was coming to greet him, so opened his window before the man reached his neck with a knife, stabbing him and running away. The incident happened close to his home in Dokki and his friend rushed him to the Police Hospital, which was metres away from him, and in 10 minutes he was in the operations room, which saved his life. “After the operation, Mahfouz was in the Intensive Care Unit and visits were not allowed. But he asked to see me. The doctors said I shouldn’t be there for more than three minutes and I promised to commit to that. But when Naguib saw me he started to tell me about what happened; he described the stabbing moment as if strong claws had penetrated his neck,” Salmawy recounted. Mahfouz wondered aloud to Salmawy, “Why this guy would do this to himself? He is a strong man; he could have been a sports player, or any other thing, but now he is going to jail,” Salmawy said.

“You seem upset about what is going to happen to him, not upset about what he has done to you,” Salmawy said, before Mahfouz replied: “They did this to our youth; they set them up and convinced them with extreme ideas and turned them into killers. I forgive him, but I can’t pardon him. It is not in my hands anymore.” Mohammed Nagi, who stabbed Mahfouz, did it because he was ordered to kill him from the emir of his group, who told him that Mahfouz was an infidel.

“I was amazed that Mahfouz forgave the man who stabbed him, so I decided I will go meet [the man] in prison and confront him. I was sure that will change his heart. I went to him and I told him, ‘Do you know he forgave you?’ But he answered saying that he doesn’t care and if there’s anything that he regrets it is not succeeding to kill Mahfouz as he was ordered, and he would do it again if he had the chance,” Salmawy said. “I asked him why. He said because he was an infidel and wrote his blasphemy in Awlad Haritna (Children of the Alley), which was not published in Egypt. I asked him, ‘Did you read it or read any work by Mahfouz?’ He answered, no but the emir told them so,” Salmawy added.

Aside the various assassination attempts, there were various other means of silencing or clamping down upon creative writers or literary critics. Mahfouz grew up among numerous immensely talented young literary critics. The unbearable nature of the hazards of literary criticism probably accounted for the change of literary foci by many of them who later ventured into other areas of scholarship. For instance, Mustapha Abdur-Razzaq turned to Islamic philosophy, Adil Kamil, to the study of Law, and Sayyid Qutb to Islamic work and Qur’anic scholarship. In a generation that was probably a very close sequel to that of Taha Hussain, Mustapha Rafi’, Mahmoud Aqqad, literary critics were brazenly persecuted and horrendously suppressed.

Both Mahfouz and Adil wrote their first novels in 1943 and the works were subjected to criticism by Sayyid Qutb which left indelible marks in the consciousness of the readers. But political powers were also deployed in the critical engagement between Aqqad and Rafi’, both of whom were, with Taha Hussain “the three Egyptian literary musketeers”. Aqqad was politically connected but did not employ those connections in his literary wars. However, his own political regime ended and Rafi’ became politically powerful. He did not hesitate to “crush” his literary foe so ruthlessly. Aqqad lost his job as a Visiting Lecturer. He lost his job as a columnist to a government news outlet. He was harassed left right and centre and was even banned from making public presentations. He was almost extinguished on account of the incapability of his literary adversaries to match his intellectual strength. But, what does this really imply for literary criticism in Nigeria of today especially with regard to the Arabic scholarship of Mustapha Zuglool of Nigeria?

Zuglool successfully introduced literary ingredients in the area of historical scholarship. This was an area pioneered by Kole Omotoso in his Just Before Dawn. Doyen of African History, J.K. Ade-Ajayi once remarked that “the fiction entitled Just Before Dawn produced by a literary writer was more insightful as history than the 12 volumes of compilation of archival material without adequate historical analysis and evaluation by the National Commission.” This is the meeting point between critical historical scholarship and African Literature.

Were it that Ade-Ajayi was familiar with Zuglool’s critical literary historical scholarship as demonstrated in his magnum opus, Azhar al-Ruba, he would have applauded him like Omotoso who also had its roots in Arabic Literature and was in the earliest generation of Arabic students at the University of Ibadan –and a good number of them were Christians and brilliant scholars! Before his doctorate in Arabic Drama from Edinburgh in 1970, he too was once under the sledge hammer of the intolerant Yoruba-speaking academic Arabicists who wondered why a non-Muslim could be so committed to Arabic scholarship. Frustrated and feeling unsafe and insecure, Omotoso the promising Arabicist left the University of Ibadan for the University of Ife (as it then was).

Today, against all odds and vicissitudes, he is a world-famous Professor of African Literature, domiciled in South Africa and a potential leader of the generation succeeding that of the trio of Achebe-Soyinka-Okigbo-J.P. Clark! As for Zuglool, his Azhar al-Ruba like Omotoso’s Just Before Dawn, was unprecedented in content, language, and imagery. This certainly did not go down well with many and there were stigmatizations and name-callings. There were bashings and derogatory remarks by even minor and substandard scholars with poor grasp of Arabic. He was practically demonized and almost rendered unpopular in the race-course of Arabic scholars.

Yet, there were critical comments by eminent Arabic scholars who were either his younger ones or contemporaries. It was reliably reported, and widely too, that a notable and revered Arabic scholar described the work as a verbatim copy of the thirteenth century Muhammad Bn Masani’s Azhar- al-Ruba. This, to me, was a literary assassination attempt on Zuglool! It is premature to name here examples of such literary assassins. I found such a declaration ridiculous especially where an elderly scholar is involved.

There also were undeserved tongue-lashings and vituperations by Arabic scholars of a particular ancestry, in their public lectures. One of them, a relatively young and active writer, made bold to produce an appreciable literary criticism of Zuglool’s Al-Azhar, but was later rattled and committed to the literary dustbin alongside his numerous collaborators, by one of the students of Zuglool. It almost became a “literary civil war” between two camps. On one side was a group of promising Arabic scholars who though inspired by the spirit of clannishness, were not really of a poor level Arabic literary knowledge and skills, and on the other, a one-man literary battalion constituted by a university-based academic researcher who is a multi-lingual creative writer. He devoured them all like a carnivorous beast!

That Arabic literary “civil war” of the twenty-first century Yorubaland confirmed Tony Afejuku’s words that “Critics of conscience are giving way to critics of ethnic (or sectional) value, critics who encourage and father commercialism”. It also confirmed his observation that “the meaningful call and avid promotion of an African aesthetic which earlier critics and writers such as JP Clark championed are now being controversially abused as JP Clark’s “…traditional” literature and criticism is now being bastardized as ethnic bigotry worshipped as useful criticism in several quarters where critics of this sort and mind speak of the works of authors and writers from their ethnic, regional and “national” groups as texts that must be studied and interpreted from the traditions and elements that inspired and produced them”. “A critic outside the ethnic tradition is censored disingenuously and disadvantageously to the extent that he or she is accused of using strange, foreign elements and criteria to judge, say, a Yoruba or Igbo imaginative literature”, Afejuku remarks. This characterization is as true in Nigeria of literary criticism in English as it is therein of Arabic literary criticism where Zuglool was, at different times, a participant and a victim.

Accordingly, Zuglool’s one-man literary squad student was declared “a literary heretic” and “intellectual eccentric” for daring to provide a presumably unprecedented sacrilegious analysis and sanctimonious criticism of certain giant Arabic scholars, especially where scholars like his teacher and his grand teacher, Al-Iluriyy, were involved. It is recalled that Al-Iluriyy was extensively and unapologetically critical of Al-Adabiyy. Yet only thrice was his own scholarship subjected to critical evaluation outside the university setting. The most remarkable of these three was Braimah Bari’s Adwa’ ‘ala Kitab al-Islam al-Yawm wa gadan fi Naijiria, published in 1986. Although, there were about three rejoinders by his students including a joint booklet by a team of five Arabic scholars, the most engaging response was offered by Al-Iluriyy himself under the title Ashi ‘aat al-‘Uqul wa al-Nuqul, almost instantaneously. Yet Braimah Bari’s work proved to be a lacerative and deeply incisive critique of Al-Iluriyy. Yet, in the same literary clime, Zuglool received more bashing than his critic student. Why can he not call him to order? Why has he been silent about the criticisms? Is he pleased that his own student is picking holes in his teacher’s scholarship? It was a tough time for Mustapha Zuglool, especially in view of his place in the larger literary ideological society involved. His experience in this regard was part of the hazards of literary criticism and he would have really loved to intervene decisively and if only…But, that was never to be and what really transpired is a subject for another piece.
• Saheed Ahmad Rufai (Ph.D Curriculum and Pedagogy; Ph.D History and Security Studies; Ph.D in-view Comparative Literature) is Dean, Faculty of Education, Sokoto State University.