The Nature of Social Commitment

             While it would amount to ingratitude of the utmost not to acknowledge the prodigious creativity of the work, its worth as a socially committed effort encapsulating and imparting positive orientation aimed at solving the galaxy of problems it highlights is suspect. This thrust is based on the belief that apart from articulating societal ills and shortcomings, literature should also be concerned with the implicit prescription of attainable solutions to the  to the pin pointed problems.

             In my thinking, a teacher who, after identifying a learning disability in his pupils failed to employ any of the teaching methods or a combination of teaching methods to assist the pupils overcome the abnormality, is a failure.

            This reasoning makes a case for literary works to conscientise the real recipients  of their predicaments, the bashing and disparagement and implicitly informs them on how to go about overcoming such denigration. To assume otherwise is shoving literature from its sublimal level to the abyss of ridicule.

            Egudu (1978:2) demonstrates this inclination when he said,

                                          although literature may not and should not usurp the office

                                          of a pulpit-sermon or political propaganda, it is difficult to see

                                           how this art whose primary means of accomplishing it is

                                           language (which itself  has a duty to communicate), can fail

                                           to evoke some response or reaction from the reader: for every

                                           communication system operates on the basis of a stimulus-

                                           recognition-response relationship.

             He believes that what writers discuss in their works and how they do the discussion are products of ‘social reality.’ These in turn, he advocates ensure that readers show reaction to a piece of literary work. In conclusion, he said,

                                            one’s reaction to literary works may not be a simple course of

                                            physical action (and it does not have to be ;)it may be only a                                             

                                            mental or emotional reaction, which can lead to action—

                                            physical or intellectual.

               Operating on similar wave length, Ewen (1984:192) quoting Nurudeen Farah said,  

                                            …the writer in Africa and third world countries is looked

                                            upon as the contributor to and/or creator/shaper of the

                                            nation’s enlightened option; he is the doctor and it is he

                                            who must diagnose and then prescribe the right drug for

                                            the nation’s illness; he is to a great number of people,

                                            the light whose beams guide the ark to safety.

                 By implication, Egudu and Farah achieve a unity of observation in that what the latter sees as ‘the beams that guide the ark to safety’ is tantamount to the former’s  

‘stimulus-recognition-response relationship.’ What is of immediate relevance to this discourse is that literary works in a developing society cannot afford not to evoke a response from the readers. The pertinent question is how does it go about inducing this response—physical or intellectual?

               Achieving this ultimate end depends on how consistent our creative writers are in instilling in their audience a pattern of active consciousness that can recognize every colour and nature of social deprivation. By persistently harping on the various options and alternatives capable of alleviating his sufferings, the reader would have been armed with necessary vision to identify a disadvantage situation, and by making a synthesis of the implicitly analysed alternatives and options, with the necessary arms to right the wrongs.

                Our writers should be bold enough to create new awareness through their works. They should establish new creative culture which has the capability of making their audience internalize the propensity of effective response: the type of response that prompts Karega and Co to initiate the journey to the city; not the type of awareness that makes Okonkwo commit suicide, makes Obi Okonkwo join the bandwagon of corruption, and definitely not the type of consciousness that makes the interpreters to assemble in order ‘to discuss a pantheon of gods on canvas.’ What is being emphasized here is that writers in this emerging society of ours should break away from the old order, and create works that are on the side of the oppressed majority; works that treat all the facets of the bastardization  of the masses, not only social neglect and ridicule but also economic, political, educational and cultural.

                Aligning with the kind of active passivity and tolerance, stinking with cowardly disposition Mwangi endows his characters in Kill Me Quick  might do incalculable damage to the quality of the response obtainable from the reading public.

                 Is Mwangi telling his audience that faced with the situation Maina and Meja find themselves early in the novel: they had just lost a menial job got for them by an old man, Boi, and in the usual contemplatory mien following such catastrophe, Maina said to his contemporary…

                                             may be we shall find another Boi to get us a job.

                 A wish his partner, Meja, compliments,

                                               you yourself told me we have to hang on to what we have                                

                                               got, life. Things will improve. Let us wait and see.

                         Should indulge in such silly reasoning and insolent contemplation, almost parasitic inclination as the protagonists show above? Or is he admonishing them to, after a fruitless search for job, release their resourcefulness to transforming them from a man to a thief and a robber and into a jailbird and a wreck, thereby constituting themselves into social nuisance and compounding the problem of society?

                          And when the author brings the toiling masses, by implication, the farm hands, under the focus of his pen, it is to show us the level of their internalised imbecility: some items were declared missing by their white master, and in the process of the search that followed,

                                            the articles were found. They were tied into a nice bundle

                                            and tucked away under a cookery rack, where no one with

                                             two eyes myopic or not would (not) have failed to see them.

                                             Meja was struck speechless; Maina swore repeatedly. This is

                                             a frame up, he cried. We did not steal them. I swear someone 

                                              placed them there.

                                              The fat boss watched them, his face flushed with anger,

                                               which of you did it, he roared. Meja started to say

                                               something then stopped and swallowed loudly. Sweat

                                               covered his face. Boi did it, Maina went on to say. We did

                                               not. (Then) Boi vanished in the direction of the kitchen

                              Boi’s act of vanishing in the direction of the kitchen coming on the heel of Maina’s accusation is enough to have suggested to a more conscious and imaginative crowd that Boi’s act is more than a coincidence and a full investigation demanded. Instead, the crowd,

                                                    with hateful glance at the two youths who had angered

                                                    their master dispersed.

Conclusion

                          As time makes its eternal slow but significant progress, the African writer and the writer in Africa and other developing society must come out boldly in defence of the oppressed and exploited members of the society and assist them in ‘claiming their own.’ He should remember that these exploited and debased people are engaged in implicit struggle with the forces that are relentlessly accentuating their misery. The writer is inevitably needed to

                                                      ‘dive into the sources,’ and give moral direction and              

                                                        vision to a struggle which though suffering temporary                           

                                                         reaction, is continuous and is changing the face of a

                                                         movement.

                           So that when the plight of the masses is sufficiently redeemed, the artist will be counted as one of the forces that accentuated the redemption.

(1) Egudu, R N     Modern African Poetry and the African Predicament. The Macmillan

                              Press Limited, London and Basingstoke, 1978           

(2) Ngugi’s response to a question at a round-table discussion on ‘The Role of Culture in the African Revolution,’ Published in The African Communist, No 113, 2^nd Quarter, 1988.

(3)Ewen, D.R,  ‘Nurudeen Farah’ in The Writing of East and Central Africa, G D Killam (ed)  Heinemann London,1984

(4) Ngugi, Satire in Nigeria, Published in Protest and Conflict in African Literature, Pieterse and Maro (ed), 1969, Heinemann, London.

(5) Mwangi, Meja. Kill Me Quick, Heinemann, London, 1973,