 African political thought, part eight. It seems in retrospect just a very, very short time ago when in 1960 Harold McMillan travelled to South Africa and gave his famous Wind of Change speech in which he said that the wind of change was sweeping the continent. And of course this was a warning to the South African parliament that they had to adapt to changing times to the wind or they would face immense difficulties in the future. The South African parliament of course ignored what he had to say but it was certainly prophetic that there was a wind of change. It was in many respects a very problematic wind of change. And what McMillan was talking about was not only a wind of change that would manifest itself in the decolonisation of former territories, particularly former British colonies. He was also talking about a new demeanour in international relations, one in which Britain would be less powerful than before and one in which power would be replaced. He hoped by British influence and he had a very great deal of trust and hope in the intellectual influence of Great Britain. The same hope was manifest for instance in the decolonisation of the Francophonie, the former French colonies. The French metropolitan government hoped that the new rulers would be sufficiently infused by all things French and particularly by French philosophical habits not to desert the motherland completely. The British had been significantly less adept in terms of their intellectual conquest of Africa but hoped nevertheless that the intellectual imprint would continue to bind the former colonies to the metropole. Now in fact this proved to be highly problematic and today we're going to have a brief look particularly at two African thinkers who struggled with the question of what to do with metropolitan thought, what to do with metropolitan language. We mentioned last week the debt that Tarbo and Becky owed to the Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wathiongo and Ngugi wrote a pioneering controversial but extremely influential book called Decolonising the Mind. It had an immense impact on Becky and on many other people and in this book Ngugi basically said that the habits of thought which were built into the habits of expression in the English language were such that even though politically free the African subject was not intellectually free. To try to accomplish the project of freedom Ngugi began to write his novels in Kikuyu, his own language but in trying to do so he himself had to face up to a number of problems. Firstly of course Kikuyu is not spoken by everybody even in Kenya. It is a language among other languages. It is a language in Kenya that also has to compete not only with Kenyan languages but regional languages like Swahili. So to what extent could authenticity actually reflect a new national experience and to what extent could this kind of linguistic autonomy, this kind of linguistic independence reflect only a factionalism within a new modern nationalism. Ngugi never completely answered that question and he never really quite lost his penchant for expressing himself in structures of thought that were peculiarly influenced by the western metropole. His great novel Petals of Blood, even though this was published before decolonising the mind, is structured according to the different parts of W.B. Yates's poem about the beast slouching towards Bethlehem. It was influenced therefore by a western poem, in this case an Irish poem of rebellion, but nevertheless Ngugi borrowed from an overseas expression. And the question of where does the metropole end, where does the local begin, and in modern times how these two interact, how they intersect, how they even compete with each other, was not fully answered by Ngugi's formulation that the mind needed to be decolonised via language. In a way someone who is much more successful in trying to confront this very problem was the Nigerian writer, W. Yates Shoyinka. Shoyinka seems to have come from a very rebellious family in the sense that the great Nigerian fellow was a close relative of his. But Shoyinka was someone who was, like Ngugi, trained in the west here in England. He was a literary person. He studied English literature, he was very involved in the literary and particularly the dramatic scene here in this country. For some years Shoyinka was involved as a director at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea and as such he became greatly familiar with the entire canon of modern English drama. The idea of being able to portray drama as something which represented the experiences of people inflected his novels so that to a certain extent one of his early novels, the interpreters, can almost be read as a piece of drama, a play rewritten in novel-esque form. What he was trying to do was to portray the speech of his protagonist and how this speech tried to grapple with the difficulties of modernity. And particularly in Nigeria as it began its years of independence entered civil war, entered a post-civil war era of corruption and great difficulty with successive military governments and particularly difficulties with a lack of transparency, a lack of honesty in government. The entire experience made Shoyinka consider Africa and particularly Nigeria as being a running sore. How do you grapple with something that is essentially putrid in terms of its product, something that is putrid in terms of its artifact? So what he was trying to do in his writing was to express this great difficulty of transacting a new nation, of transacting a new state, of trying to do so through novels, through plays and through poetry and at the same time trying to grapple with his metropolitan inheritance, an anglophonic formation and his attempt to recapture some sense of authenticity for his part of the continent that even so at that point in time was going through an extremely difficult period. Now I think that in trying to marry all of these contradictory elements he was more successful than in Gugi who tried to isolate only one of these elements and to elevate them above all else. What you have in the opus of Shoyinka in his work and try to represent a poetic voice that came from his own people but in a sense also of modern critique of the modern nation state that has gone astray and in particular in his attempt to represent the psychological condition of those who are caught up in this kind of contradictory modernity despite all of the antique, despite all of the authentic reference points in Shoyinka's work what you have finally is a body of work which reflects a particular but very very discernible distinctive modernity which speaks to an African voice which deservedly won the Nobel Prize for literature.