KATWIWA MULE
Translation, Mistranslation, and Cultural Theory: There are no simple answers to these questions, much less to the more internationally debated ones specific to literature: Is literature written in English by an African writer such as Chinua Achebe less African than a text written in Kiswahili or Gikuyu or Yorùbá? Given the violent political history of African countries and the reconfigured hegemonies that have come into existence as a result of colonial patterns of settlement and administration, uneven development, and the nature of the emergent post-colonial state, does writing in any one indigenous language create new problems or exacerbate existing problems of hegemonic discourse? What in fact constitutes an indigenous language? Should Arabic be considered indigenous, particularly in view of its long history on the continent, and its importance for Muslim Africans? Much more problematic is the position of Afrikaans, which is not only a colonizer’s language, but is inextricably associated with apartheid. We made a decision, in soliciting and selecting material, to exclude texts originally written in English or French or Arabic because these languages have been the mainstay of the field. But the complex theoretical issues that translations in these languages raise deserve to be addressed, because they are at the heart of translation studies in Africa. In large part, our reasoning was pragmatic: texts in “indigenous” languages are far less accessible to a large readership, and we were aiming to present a sample of the wealth and variety of material to be tapped. We also made a potentially controversial decision to include Afrikaans, not because we were unaware of its origins and political history (the trauma of the 1976 Soweto massacre, for example) or the debate about its status, but because in fact it is used by some Africans, Black and Colored, as well as by White South Africans, and it is not readily available in translation to an English readership. (One of the entries in this issue is the poetry of Black South African Poet Adam Small who writes in Afrikaans.) In addition, for non-East Africans, it would also be useful to revisit the status of Kiswahili as an indigenous language. Depending on what system of grouping one uses, Kiswahili has 23 dialects, but the dialect that was used to standardize the language is the one used in the Zanzibar archipelago, known as kiunguja , ‘the most corrupted of all 23.’ It was our hope that contributors would address many of the issues widely discussed in translation studies today, and that they would bring to bear on these issues some of the complexity particular to African translation and literary studies, building on but going beyond recent developments in the rapidly developing fields of translation studies and postcolonial studies. We hoped for a provocative, sophisticated and productive dialogue among African and Africanist translators and critics, using a broad range of historical and methodological approaches to address issues pertaining to the theory and practice of translation in Africa. What we have come to realize in the process of bringing this project to fruition is that the field has enormous potential for development, but also that it is a very young field, in some areas still a nascent field, with all the problems inherent in any early stage of development. We see this journal issue as a continuation of existing scholarship, however scanty, and we are excited by the prospect of growing communication, cooperation and sophistication in discourse among writers, translators and critics of African literatures. Singly and taken together, the selections we present raise (and occasionally explicitly address) a host of both general and specific questions: what is the role of translation in understanding the major cultural, linguistic, literary, political and even historical developments in contemporary Africa? How has translation figured in the sociopolitical upheavals that have accompanied historical changes, particularly with regard to issues of what Biodun Jeyifo calls arrested decolonization,2 governance, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, and power? Put another way, can translation play any role in producing a critical citizenry in a continent where literacy levels remain abysmally low? How has the emergence of the debate about the adoption of national languages, the language of African literature, and the development and definition of the literature itself changed the way we look at translation? How have new literary theories and global social movements shifted debates in the field? Given political and social developments that have given rise to the current transnationalization of the curriculum in the broad sense of the word, especially the brief ascendancy and subsequent decline of area and cultural studies, what new theories of translation will arise in conjunction with the pressing need to render texts into the indigenous languages, most of which have been subject to the vicissitudes of colonial histories? What about the shift from post-colonial to global studies and the attendant geopolitical and ideological issues? In what ways has the renewed interest in African oral cultures and the accompanying collection of oral histories, epics, oral narratives, and poetry and their translation to European and other African languages shaped, or been shaped by, translation? What about more recent technological developments that have made possible the preservation of electronically stored oral texts, presented as an alternative to the perceived sterility of the written text? How do computer programs for translation shape the future of translation? What issues does the slow but increasing access to print and electronic media (or the so-called information superhighway) in Africa pose for translators, and what impact does this access have on the reception of various forms of cultural productions? How is translation among African languages similar to (or different from) translation among African and European languages? How should we analyze translation across genres and media, especially the translation of multi-generic texts such as epics, or adaptation of texts into films and the addition of subtitles to films? What about those aspects of globalization that are widely seen as having a pernicious impact, for example the boom in tourism, and what role does translation play in fortifying such a system of unequal exchange? What about texts in technical and scientific areas, given the erroneous assumption that science and technology stand outside culture? Is there a possibility for charting new directions in translations in African scholarship in the years to come and what might these new directions look like? Above all, what are the emerging issues in translation in African languages in a post-colonial context? These are the issues that we had hoped would form the core of this special issue, besides of course actual translations of essays, poems, epics and short stories. My introduction does not pretend to take up all these questions. Rather, I foreground them in the hopes that future scholarship will accentuate the peculiarity of the African encounter with translation, and the importance and originality of African contributions to this field of inquiry. Such originality begins with the recognition that many of the debates, whether they pertain to the question of one continental language, national languages, or the language of African literature, arise from a desire to extricate ourselves from a dependence on “categories and conceptual frameworks which depend on a Western epistemological order” (Mudimbe x). What I want to demonstrate in the discussion that follows is that the questions above, and the exacerbating circumstances that have made them issues requiring our attention, demand an approach, to quote philosopher and writer Mudimbe again, that synthesizes “the complex questions about knowledge and power in and on Africa” (xi). Because I am grounded in literature, it is only logical to begin with the issue that has been central to the discipline since its inception, before going on into other areas: the question of language. The debate about what should be the language of African literature continues to be as animated as when the question initially arose at the now famous first congregation of African writers of English expression at Makerere University, Uganda in 1964.3 That this dilemma should have occupied center stage at that particular moment in history was important because of the event’s temporal proximity to the colonial era. Most African countries were just emerging from what Mudimbe has appropriately characterized as a brief but traumatic and controversial period that “signified a new historical form and the possibility of radically new types of discourses on African traditions and cultures” (1). Quite understandably, most African intellectuals and writers were part of the nationalist struggles that led to the rise of movements such as Negritude and Pan-Africanism. Both movements were an integral part of the “long and arduous struggle for decolonization” (Ahluwalia 21). A nationalist consciousness and a commitment to cultural renaissance became the defining ideological foundation for most of their writing. Questions ranging from what African intellectuals read 4 to the public roles of African writers in the emerging social, cultural and political configurations occupied center stage. As Kwameh Anthony Appiah states: “trained in Europe or in schools and universities dominated by European culture, the African writer’s concern is not with the discovery of a self that is the object of inner voyage of discovery. Their problem—though not of course their subject—is finding a public role, not a private self. . . . African intellectuals are uncomfortable outsiders, seeking to develop their cultures in directions that will give them a public role” (76). Part of the reason why the debate over language is not about to disappear is because the issues that gave rise to it are yet to be resolved, at the same time as the corpus of literary works in both colonial and African languages is ever expanding. Prominent writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o have rejected English in favor of Gikuyu, and the practical, ideological, and pedagogical ramifications of this decision have generated a lot of contentious scholarship, primarily in the West. The preoccupation with what is seen by Western critics as Ngugi’s cultural radicalism is based on the assumption that his decision is universally accepted in Africa. But the critics’ focus almost solely on language, as if language were an end in itself, deflects attention from issues more uncomfortable to consider: political, economic and social factors, ethnic enmities, the reshuffling of hierarchical privilege. The attention to language as if it were divorced from other factors is a simplistic and in the end a condescending view of what is “radical,” hence politically correct and good. In Kenya, Ngugi’s home country, he is summoned to answer a different set of questions that have nothing to do with radicalism: Does he understand Kiswahili, the national language, sufficiently to be able to write in it? Is he entrenching ‘Kikuyu’ nationalism by his decision? Does his decision in fact contribute to further fragmentation of a nation that is already too polarized along ethnic lines? Such questions by Ngugi’s peers and critics have been given credibility by comparisons to the situation in Tanzania, where Kiswahili language and literature is much more developed. (In fact, Tanzania has produced very few works in either English or German although it was colonized by both powers.) Such comparisons are inevitable for several reasons, one of which deserves some elaboration: the development of Kiswahili in the two countries followed a similar trajectory, moving from its ethnic base in the coastal areas to the interior as a language of trade and Christian proselytization. The language was later, in contradiction to the objectives of the colonizers and the missionaries, used to unite Kenyans and Tanzanians in their anti-colonial and nationalist struggles. In the case of Tanzania, for example, Kiswahili was used as a language of exclusion under German colonial rule. Because the Germans did not want to let the natives gain access to their cultural world by teaching them German, they put a lot of emphasis on the teaching of Kiswahili. Ironically, however, Kiswahili was to become the language unifying Tanzanians against German and, later, British colonial rule. In Kenya, the issue was much more complicated: the language policy kept shifting, depending on the interests of the British colonizers. In the final analysis, however, following independence, this language was seen as an important tool for maintaining the fragile unity among disparate communities that had now been brought arbitrarily together under the banner of one nation where there has been none before. It is therefore not an exaggeration to state that the ramifications for Ngugi have been different in his own country from what one finds in the West, and perhaps more negative than he could have anticipated: some people simply won’t read his work, even if it is translated! 5 In any case, although the Gikuyu are the majority ethnic group in Kenya, they constitute a minority relative to the total population of the country. The issue of literacy complicates the problem further, more than the question of how many people read or speak Gikuyu. But this criticism of Ngugi by his peers also masks a more complicated scenario clear in the case of Uganda. Various attempts to institute Kiswahili as the national language have met stiff resistance from all over the country, even though a good section of the population speaks the language. Interestingly enough, it was the government of the megalomaniac and brutal dictator Idi Amin Dada that first declared Kiswahili the national language of Uganda. Within the less than 10 years that Amin was in power, his government was responsible for the murder of more than 250,000 people, the largest peacetime catastrophe in Africa. Because Amin’s largely illiterate army spoke Kiswahili, the language came to be associated with murderers. Several years later president Yoweri Kaguta Museveni’s declaration of Kiswahili as the national language of Uganda has not met with as much resistance but has been largely a symbolic gesture. It is in this context of historical and political issues that the debate about the language situation and the issue of translation in sub-Saharan Africa needs to be understood. I have dwelt on the language question at some length because the debate, quite often acrimonious, has tended to emphasize “the attitude of the African writer vis-à-vis the European language rather than the creative use of the language” (Gyasi 2). This focus elides several important issues. What is the relationship of original texts in English by African writers to the “foreign” language of the colonizer? And what is the relationship of such original texts to translation? What, in any case, do such questions have to do with the political economy of knowledge production? These issues are important because to look at the issue of English language as somehow unrelated to the various forms of resistance with which African writers have responded to Europe’s claim to cultural authority is to oversimplify the task at hand. Gyasi has further argued that African writers transformed “in [their] own terms the master’s language into a slave’s arsenal” (7). Furthermore, as Simon Gikandi aptly argues, the overriding question is: Can an African culture, or an African mode of knowledge, be articulated in a European language, in European forms, and within the epistemological contexts of colonialism and post-colonialism? If so, can the resulting narratives still be considered African? Is what we call African literature and its critical discourse still determined by ‘its external conditions of possibility’, and [does it] proceed from ‘the extension of Africa to Western fellowships of discourse’? If so, then how is Africa to be represented in a literature of its own? (9)[ emphasis mine] It is true that Ngugi and his followers are in the minority and their concerns are animated by an urgent political question: how, if at all possible, can we translate knowledge production into public value? This constituency of African writers and critics advocating the use of indigenous languages are acutely aware of their minority status, especially the less prominent writers.6 From their point of view, far too many writers continue to write in English, French, Arabic and other languages not indigenous to Africa. None of these writers claims to belong to the literary culture of the metropole. In fact, Chinua Achebe has put the issue bluntly: Africans are not anticipating a future European identity. His position on language, mischaracterized by Ngugi as “a categorical positive embrace,” (Decolonizing 7) captures the attitude with which many African writers have responded to this particular issue: “I have been given the English language and I intend to use it” (Morning 102). Achebe’s relationship with the English language is much more complex than Ngugi suggests.7 What is needed then, far from absolutist positions like Ngugi’s, is an approach that is “comparative, relational, and historical” (Alexander and Mohanty xvi). Considering the strategies of appropriation through which African writers relate to colonially imposed languages would enable people on both sides of the issue to take a more critical view of African literature in European languages as a form of translation “fully informed by the tensions that traverse all cultural representation” (Sherry Simon 1996, 8). That is to say African literature must also be understood as a formal instrument of cultural production, and translation must be seen as a crucial aspect of this dimension of the literature itself. Recent studies in the practice of post-colonial translation have sought to locate the field in this broad perspective. (Dingawaney, Lefevere, Basnett and Trivedi) 8. Similarly, recent criticism of modern African writing has sought to emphasize why such an approach to African literature is necessary. Underlying all these debates, I would argue, is a question of translation although the word is hardly ever used. Let us for a moment consider how such an approach might inform the way we look at translation. If Chinua Achebe and Ngugi, as is indeed the case with many African writers of their generation, wrote their earlier works to educate their readers (and this category can hardly be interpreted narrowly to mean only African readers), they have made it known that their anxiety was fueled by earlier narratives about Africans by such European writers such as Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad. And reading through some of these narratives, one does not need to overtax one’s imagination to see why. Toward the end of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson , the title character, a caricaturist’s African, in a moment of ultimate self-effacement or self-deprecation, makes a final wish after he is condemned to die: ‘Don’ you mind, sah, about dis hanging. I don care for it one lil bit. Why’—he laughs with an air of surprise and discovery—‘I no fit know nutting about it. He too quick. Ony I like you do him youself, sah. If you no fit to shoot me. I don’t ‘gree for dem seargent do it, too much. He no my frien’. But you my frien’. You my father and my mother. I tink you hang me youself.” (Mister Johnson 224). If literature presents a world to its readers, then Cary has translated to his audiences an African world and personality as understood through the colonial lens. Mr. Johnson becomes not just a signifier of social disorder and the unteachability of the native but an epitome of the Hegelian “peculiarly African character [that] is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to it, we must give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas—the category of Universality . . . The Negro . . .[who] exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed state” (qtd. in Coquery-Vidrovitch 1999, 39). Such characters as Mr. Johnson are not uncommon in European translations of the composite African character. Mr. Johnson resembles Gagool of Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, Kamante of Isaak Dinesen aka Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa , and the speechless cannibals of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness . 9 The list is endless. In such writings, celebrated twentieth-century European writers have translated the figure of the colonized, in this case the African, into some thing that their European audiences could make sense of. It scarcely needs repeating that Achebe’s Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart is a rewriting, or a translation if you will, of Mr. Johnson at several levels. First, if we agree with Octavio Paz’s radical proposition that “each text is uunique, yet at the same time it is the translation of another text” and that “no text can be completely original because the language itself, in its very essence, is already a translation” (154) , then it becomes clear that Achebe is first and foremost translating his own culture, his world, the world of the Igbo by reducing it to signs and phrases that form the narrative of Things Fall Apart . Gikandi observes: Achebe’s text painstakingly represents Igbo culture—in different scenarios and historical situations—in the process of providing interpretations about itself, or reflecting on the primary linguistic codes that govern it. The book is packed with countless semiotic codes –from the mundaneness of breaking kola nuts (p. 5) to the dance of the ancestral spirits. Some of these signs are intended to provide a cultural background to the characters, but they should not be reduced to ‘local colour’; rather, they are Achebe’s way of pointing to the values that govern this society; signs are already as ideological symbolizations of cultural order and its spirit of things (32). More importantly for my argument, Achebe is not writing in Igbo. Alas! He is writing in English, translating the Igbo social and cultural world not in Igbo but in the language of his colonial masters, while at the same time re-translating the character of the African that narratives like Mister Johnson have purveyed to Cary’s readers. Achebe himself, his world, his language, are perpetually locked in “violent transactions” that cannot be easily reduced to positive embrace, as Ngugi would have it.10 Achebe’s mission, like that of his arch-critic Ngugi, becomes that of attempting to wrestle the English language away from its historical mission of translating the African in a way that subordinates “the tangible, physical forms of transposition, transportation, transmission and transference . . . to English language traditions and control” ( 19). Ngugi himself has written very eloquently and convincingly about this phenomenon, which he characterizes as a cultural bomb. He writes: The English language is itself imbued with negativity in its representations of blackness. . . . The white lies are reinforced by religion, christianity mostly, in which God and purity and grace were seen in terms of whiteness while sin and satan were scenes of blackness. Heaven was the place where the elect of God would wear white robes of purity while hell was the place where the rejects of God would burn to charcoal blackness. . . . Not surprisingly, the African Christian, desirous for a place among the band of the saved, could be heard, loud and clear, singing to his maker: Wash me, redeemer, and I shall be whiter than snow. And if God was slow in his responses, there was [sic] plenty of skin lightening creams manufactured in white-owned factories to help in the spiritual journey from black death to deathless whiteness (Writers in Politics, 10) If Mr. Johnson feels honored to be killed by a white man, Isaak Dinesen suggests that Kamante, like all other Africans of her fictional and real world, can easily be understood by looking at the behavior of dogs. Achebe’s Okonkwo, who would rather kill himself than succumb to the humiliation of being judged by a white man, is both a faithful and an unfaithful translation: faithful because Okonkwo mirrors the character that Achebe believes is the accurate depiction of Africans in their momentous encounter with European colonial powers; unfaithful because he is neither Cary’s caricature nor that of the popular colonial imagination. Unlike Conrad’s mute and dumb cannibals, Okonkwo is a speaking subject whose actions at every turn have a conscious motivation and can never quite be relegated to a paragraph at the end of yet another colonial narrative. 11 Through this character, Achebe, like his contemporaries, is reinterpreting a whole tradition that he has been nourished on but he is also simultaneously translating and retranslating his world to multiple, differentially located audiences. And this is the point many critics have missed by reading a simplistic notion of didacticism into his essay “The Novelist as a Teacher.” After all, the African characters in this later twentieth-century writing build on a tradition well established in earlier colonial writings. Shakespeare’s deformed Caliban12 and his devilish witch of a mother Sycorax, a North African moor, “who embodies an aberration of nature, both in terms of her sexuality (her impregnation by an incubus) and her racial identity as a non-European” already rehearse some of the attributes we find in Mr. Johnson, Kamante, and Gagool (Singh 200). As Singh further explains, such depictions provided a way of mapping European identity against the images of otherness, a point so well explained by Tymoczko: “Translation is paradoxically the means by which difference is perceived, preserved, and proscribed. Translation stands as one of the most significant means by which one culture represents another” (17). Frantz Fanon clearly states the motivation for such mappings of difference: It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say with the help of the army and the police force, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of the colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil . . . the native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values . . . All values in fact are irrevocably poisoned and diseased as soon as they are allowed to come into contact with the colonized race . . when the settler seeks to describe the native fully, he constantly refers to the bestiary (41-42). 13 Cary’s presentation of Mr. Johnson demonstrates more than how European audiences were supposed to understand Africans. It also typifies the way both Europeans and Africans were supposed to understand themselves in relation to each other and to their place in the natural order of things colonial. As Tymoczko further states: Where different peoples come together—in friendship or in enmity, in dominance or in resistance—they construct their interactions and their images of each other to a large extent through discursive practices. In the stories they tell of themselves and the others, in their rituals of exchange, and in daily dealings, discourse is central to constituting the boundary between groups and regulating their relations. Oppression and enslavement, rebellion and revolution, all have discursive components. Inevitably, when people and nations speak different languages, the discursive practices at the heart of their interactions must turn on translation (15). Readers have tended to take for granted Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s evocation of the war imagery implicit in his use of the word ‘bomb’ to characterize the pernicious effects of colonization, the psychological aspect being the most deleterious. But the effects of this cultural bomb were not just fortuitous. They had a material basis. Thus, the imposition of names on peoples and places ultimately translated them into a psychological void that assisted in the transfer of material wealth to the colonizing power; the situation is probably more insidious today. If one has any doubt, one need not look very far to see how the representation of current crises in Zimbabwe in the media is part of the imperial translation of African peoples as bloodmongers. How African peoples continue to be translated for the Western audience by the media is an issue that needs to be contested. When the BBC airs a graphic image of a naked white farmer (colonial settler is more appropriate) to symbolize the brutality of the blood-thirsty peoples of Zimbabwe—who apparently have no respect for human rights and for private property rights —perhaps it’s a nuisance for one to ask what constitutes human rights, when and how this land become the private property of the European settlers, how many Africans have lost their lives in more brutal ways to pave the way for private ownership of the land in question. Perhaps. Or, does one need to go too far to see why many African children born in 2002 continue to be named Fritz, Ethan (of the voyeuristic CBS reality show Survivor Africa), Paul, Mary, Jane, maybe even Madonna? Or, Pierre, after ‘nos ancêtres les Gaulois ?’ How did we arrive at this point? Frantz Fanon had already foreseen this post-colonial effect in his classic The Wretched of the Earth: “colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native’s brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it” (210). Unfortunately, decolonization has not changed the way we do business. That translation is an important aspect of everyday life grounded in relations of power is borne out by the U.S. media coverage of several events in the recent past. I have already mentioned the current crises in Zimbabwe. I will comment only on a few more mundane ones. Recently, CNN Headline News reported that there was new vocabulary after September 11th. One of the catchy phrases? If you are not dressed in a trendy fashion, then the appropriate question to ask is: “What are you wearing? A burqa?” A few months earlier, a New England Cable News news anchor Maggie Reedy, her eyes bright, insinuating a knowing intimacy, posed the following stunningly ignorant question to an Afghan woman professor: “Are Afghani women happy with the bombing?” But alas, this was not new. During the Gulf War, the biggest issues in the U.S. media were Saddam Hussein and Saudi women . . . American pronouncements regarding Saudi women suggest prevalent attitudes about other peoples and cultures. One remarkable example . . . On December 27, 1990, the television show Inside Edition carried a segment on Saudi women, focusing less on Saudi women and more on the veil—supposedly the ultimate symbol of oppression. The first part of the segment showed us faceless Saudi women shrouded in ample yardage of black cloth. They did not speak. They were not made to speak. They moved against a powerful male presence: the male reporter who commented on their lives of abject subjection. Halfway through the tedious patronizing commentary another Saudi woman appeared, a college student in Jordan. She wore Western clothes (symbols of freedom), ready to speed away into the limitless unknown. This “liberated” Saudi woman spoke; she deserved to speak because she was “free” (Nnaemeka 309-10). The sensationalization that accompanies such media presentations, according to Nnaemeka, is not much different from “the pervasive sensationalization of clitoridectomy in Western media and scholarship” (313). The connection between the burqa, the veil, clitoridectomy, the land question in Zimbabwe, and imperialist discourse and violence is not hard to see. The supposed joke about the burqa cannot therefore be simply dismissed as youthful insensitivity as the CNN reporter attempted to do. It is, as Edward Said observes, “simply a repetition of appalling clichés, most of them ignorant, unhistorical, moralistic, self-righteous, and hypocritical” (99). Whether one is watching Survivor Africa, or listening to NECN or CNN, the way this form of translation takes place should be sobering. 14 Said further states: “the orientalism that distances and dehumanizes another culture is upheld, and the xenophobic fantasy of a pure “Western” identity elevated and strengthened” (99). Translation may also be viewed from another perspective. Peter Newmark argues for the view of a translator as a facilitator of understanding among peoples of the world. Newmark’s observation is important. But at the same time, it is necessary to underscore that we live in a world where cultural imperialism is the norm, in a world “where ‘development’ often follows in the footsteps of the West” (Chau 234). In this case, one is inclined to agree with Chau that the role of translation takes a different, more activist turn when it assumes the role of “a catalyst to action which is of benefit to the society as a whole” and when “notions of equivalence become less important than social effectiveness” (233). How often, for example, have we heard African politicians and academics alike use terms like “appropriate technology” with no attention to how meaningless they are when they are transplanted into the African soil? Such hollow concepts are a constant reminder that translation has both political and ideological dimensions because it often takes place in a situation of power exchange. Whether dealing with technology or literary issues, this transfer of power can easily pass unnoticed. What, from a different perspective, are the potential ramifications of Ngugi’s switch to Gikuyu language for readers who are accustomed to reading his works in English but now have to contend with translations? Does translation in this case transfer, at least momentarily, the cultural/interpretive power that Euro-American critics normally have over his work, in contrast to the local scene where he is perceived as somehow entrenching Gikuyu hegemony in his own country? This is the problem: in spite of the dearth of studies about the role of translation in constructing knowledge about Africa—whether in Africa itself or in Europe and America and the rest of the world, for that matter—the simple truth is that as long as one writes about Africa in a European language, one is involved in the process of translation. To put the issue this way is to state the obvious: there is virtually no discipline in African Studies that is untouched by translation. Whether one chooses to construct knowledge about Africa from the problematic approach of what John Champagne calls “thinking through sameness,” or through self-interpellation, as translators, difficult choices and decisions have to be made in order to arrive at translations sensitive to both the texts and their contexts. This issue acquires greater immediacy in relation to translations in a post-colonial context: to speak of translation in a post-colonial context necessarily awakens the ghost of unequal power relations. As Tymoczko formulates this ineluctable truth: “Translation has been used as a way of figuring the relations between cultures, in particular the encounter with alterity, the mechanisms of imperialism, and the special conditions of the postmodern, globalized world” (16). The linguistic and contextual shifts that translation—thus broadly defined—entails, call for approaches that privilege not one’s racial identity or geographical background but a humble and vigilant self-questioning that would enable translators both to approach the material in question with the sophistication of detail that it calls for and also to address the larger centrality of translation in the process and practice of dissemination of knowledge about Africa. In fact, when such issues come up, the discourse tends (as has happened in the case of Thomas Hale and Isidore Okpewho) to degenerate into acrimonious squabbles that hardly address the issues at stake. Okpewho’s critique of the person of Hale and the text, The Epic of Askia Mohammed, as well as Hale’s response both fail to address the central issue: the unequal power relations in the academy and the neo-colonial elements of knowledge production and dissemination. I will revisit this issue when I examine the central thesis in Hale’s paper in the section that follows. 15 The entries in this volume fall into two broad categories: essays that attempt to both review and re-orient the current state of translation studies, and actual translations into and from several languages. Some, but not all, of the translations are accompanied by lengthy and comprehensive introductions. One is an autotranslation of poems and an oral narrative composed by the author himself. Pamela Smith’s paper, “The Oral/Aural: Sound and Meaning in Yorùbá Poetic Prose Translation Akínwùmí: Ìsòlá and the Fágúnwà Tradition” argues for an approach to translation of Yorùbá texts that is attentive to the musical quality of the language. This is particularly important in the translation of poetry, a theme also taken up by Kitula King’ei, although he is more concerned with the complexities of translating across languages. Using the example of a well-known book-length poem by the late Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek, King’ei identifies several instances of ‘mistranslation’ from the English version of the poem. It is important to stress that the poem was originally written in Acholi as Wer pa Lawino and translated into English by the author himself as Song of Lawino. The challenges that King’ei describes are apparent in the fact that the author himself did not employ the meter and the rhythm of the original Acholi poem. The translator of the poem into Kiswahili is faced with a dilemma, given the current debate about the place of prosodic rules in Swahili poetry. Although King’ei’s paper does not attempt to deal with this aspect of translation, future scholarship on the challenges of translating among African languages may prove productive. But while King’ei appears most interested in bringing out the various instances of mistranslation, Pamela Smith does not see translation as a dead end. Instead, she argues that what is needed from translators is some degree of creativity in order to capture the “rhythm and sound effects,” “preserving the music of the poem” so distinctive in Yorùbá language. But King’ei’s attempt at reappraising the translation of Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino (Wimbo wa Lawino) raises several questions pertinent to translation which he has not dealt with: to what extent does a translator owe fidelity to the original? It seems King’ei is more interested in ‘accuracy’ although it remains far from clear whether by ‘accuracy’ he means a replication of the exact meaning. This position is diametrically opposed to Zaja Omboga’s, who is more interested in the larger issues that the process of translation raises and sees such a preoccupation with replicating meanings as a futile attempt that in the end may end up sacrificing intelligibility. Besides, he argues, such a preoccupation is unnecessary and is at best an ideological cul-de-sac. Kingei’s observation that this Kiswahili translation of Song of Lawino is bad is well taken and the debate between him and Omboga is a healthy one of a kind that should be nurtured. Omboga begins by asserting the centrality of translation “as a principal agent in the evolution of literate cultures (Mueller-Vollmer and Irmscher ix) and finds it rather problematic that Kiswahili scholars have been more concerned with fault-finding in Kiswahili texts in translation, presenting the problematic view of a translated text as an orphaned child of the original. Omboga correctly argues that such approaches to translation in Kiswahili have stunted the growth of the field. Furthermore, as he demonstrates, what constitutes the Kiswahili literary corpus is a body of both translated and original texts. In any case, he argues, rather than looking at how the translations are flawed, a more productive approach would be to consider the ways in which they have enriched what we have come to define as the Kiswahili literary tradition. Omboga, adopting Gideon Toury’s polysystem theory, calls for an approach to translation that focuses on the translated text and its place in the culture of the target audience. His argument does not constitute a blanket acceptance of all translations. Instead, he argues for an approach that is grounded in theoretical and conceptual frameworks that do not necessarily privilege the original text. Swahili scholars should instead be attentive to the way in which translated texts use language in a manner specific to the translator’s concerns and thus create what he calls their own textuality that is both independent of, and dependent upon, the original text. Furthermore, Omboga argues, some translators use language in a self-conscious way. Such is the case with Mwalimu Julius Nyerere’s acclaimed translation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice. Although Omboga does not provide an in-depth analysis of many of the texts he mentions, it seems to me significant that Nyerere’s radical policy of ujamaa 16 was preceded by his highly acclaimed translation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which included significant rewritings. Nyerere’s translation is marked by the use of language in a manner that reflects relations of social intercourse in the capitalist world. Thus, there is a shift from the innocence of the word ‘merchant’ to the ideologically loaded, hostile, pluralized ‘capitalist’ mabepari. A translation like Nyerere’s constitutes itself as a site of resistance precisely because literary texts, as I have previously pointed out, historically functioned as a principal means of colonial acculturation and inscription, a way of socializing the colonized into his/her proper place in relation to European colonizers; and the power of such texts could not be underestimated. What reader of Nyerere’s Mapebari wa Venisi would fail to recognize from the outset the ideological underpinnings of his title? It seems to me, then, that more than just sheer fascination with Shakespeare for all his greatness and fame, Nyerere’s translations demonstrate what Chau characterizes as activist translation, which owes more allegiance to a social cause than to the author. Nyerere was keenly aware of the “manifold conditions under which [his] translation” was produced and consumed (4). In this sense, it seems to me, Nyerere is what Venuti calls “a socially aware and politically engaged translator,” using translation to “deterritorialize” The Merchant of Venice (11). Thomas Hale’s paper here is a case study of the process through which The Epic of Askia Mohammed found its way into print. Reflecting on his experiences during the process of translating The Epic of Askia Mohammed, he confronts some of the problems specific to the translation of the oral epic as a genre. Hale argues that translators of epics are faced with some difficult choices: what narrative to record, how to translate the occult/esoteric language of an epic text, how to convey contextual elements such as music, gestures, and the interaction between the narrator and the audience, which constitute the over all interpretive aspect of the text. Furthermore, he argues, griots (whom in another context he appropriately calls “narrative interpreters of the Songhay Empire”) in their performances are translating and interpreting their cultures to their audiences. Hale also poses some interesting questions with regard to the audience for African epics: “Does one aim at a particular audience . . . or are there other audiences, African or global? . . . Is there a universal audience? Would a translation aimed at an African audience be different?” These questions are both interesting and pertinent because, as Lorna Hardwick argues, the relationship between languages and cultures is shaped by the translator “in terms of his or her purpose in writing . . . the translator’s interpretation of the wider meaning of the source text, both in its own time and for later readers [and] . . . by the readers or audience, who receive the new version and in turn give it their own meaning” (10). The question of audience is therefore an intractable one and needs to be judiciously theorized and problematized to avoid facile claims of ‘reader-friendliness.’ Can one, for example speak of unified or composite African or American audiences? In any audience, responses vary depending on the “the range of levels of familiarity which the reader, the listener or spectator may have” (Hardwick 20).17 Positing a unified American audience is particularly problematic: what could an heroic and historical narrative stand for to an American of African descent schooled in what Toni Morrison has characterized as “a strongly urged, thoroughly serviceable, companionably ego-reinforcing” brand of American Africanism? (1992, 8).18 Which African audience does one have in mind when translating an epic like The Epic of Askia Mohammed ? Epic series like the one Hale is referring to here engender multiple possibilities of changing the way discourse on Africa is carried out in classrooms across the United States. But the availability of the texts cannot, and must not be allowed to be an end in itself. Analysing the terms of discourse is at least as important as having students read such texts. Mwenda Ntarangwi’s introductory remarks to his translation of the popular taarab genre of the East African coast strike a similar chord. “No song is performed in the same way twice, nor is its meaning static. At each performance, a song’s meaning expands or changes depending on the images it expresses or what the audiences may infer from it.” The fluidity of the context of performance and the flexibility of its meaning is what makes taarab such a versatile genre. Ntarangwi’s work is particularly significant because Kiswahili poetry (and the taarab sub-genre in particular) tends to be viewed as an exclusively male genre. More important, however, is the fact that scholarship in the field of oral literature has tended to construct the oral artist as male. Yet, as Finngean has pointed out, there was equal billing in pre-colonial African societies for women and men in the production of oral literature. Recently, works such as Aissata Sidikou’s Recreating Words, Reshaping Worlds: Verbal Art of Women from Niger, Mali and Senegal (2001) have began to restore the female oral artists to the place they deserve in any study in this area, and Ntarangwi’s work finds its place among such scholarship. In the prefatory remarks to her translation of the Basaa epic Bon ba Hiton, Bertrade B. Ngo-ngijol addresses the way in which translators unquestioningly impose on the texts they translate values based on their own world sense. In the earlier French translation of the same epic, she points out, the translator imposes gender markers that are not part of the original Baasa text. This is a clear case where in translation, as Venuti points out, a text “gets rewritten in the transparent discourse dominating the target-language culture and is inevitably coded with other target-language values, beliefs and social representations, implicating the translation in the ideologies that figure social differences and may well arrange them in hierarchical relations (according to class, gender, sexual orientation, race, nation)” (5). This issue is one that translators in African languages have overlooked, a point argued very vehemently by the sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi in her recent study The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourse. Commenting on the role of translation in Yorùbá, she observes that if earlier critiques of translation of the Yorùbá language focused on problems in the poetic quality of the language that is lost in translation, the bigger problem is that “gender is what is added” (162). She emphasizes “the impact of English on Yorùbá through loan words, translation of Yorùbá culture into English, and the adoption of other Western values” and points out that “scholars of Yorùbá language and culture have tended not to grasp the full significance of Yorùbá gender neutrality” (158-9). The same argument could be extended to other African languages. In Kiswahili, Kikamba and Gikuyu, to take just a few examples, pronouns do not make gender distinctions. Thus, for example, in Kiswahili when one prefixes the third person pronoun marker a and the aspect marker na to the verb som-a (read), to form anasoma , there is no way of telling whether the person who is reading is male or female. In English, however, the statement must be rendered as ‘he is reading’ or ‘she is reading.’ Although not all African languages work this way, this example does provide a basis, as Oyewumi eloquently demonstrates, for questioning what she calls the normative assumption of “Westo-centric” gender norms in translating African cultures and patterns of social intercourse. This, she argues, is the ideological cul de sac that African intellectuals and Africanists alike seem to have imposed on themselves when translating from their languages—which simultaneously means interpreting the social and cultural patterns of their societies. Oyewumi’s argument is both lucid and compelling. Nevertheless, she unconsciously repeats an assumption common in African scholarship: a monolithic view of Europe. What she classifies as a “Westo-centric” view is really the view that major colonial powers, especially the English and French, imposed on Africa. Far from being monolithic, the West also has indigenous cultures and languages which are subjugated and marginalized and that do not necessarily privilege the normative assumptions that are the target of her critique. Nor do all non-marginalized European languages conform to the rules of English and French. But such reservations do not minimize the importance of her critique. The linguistic differences she highlights have significant ramifications: “what are the processes through which translation maintains and activates gender constructs?” (Simon, 2). In fact, if we concur with Olankule George’s assertion that the impact of European colonization is not limited only to linguistic imposition but also to the “indigenous linguistic—which is to say conceptual—universe of the colonized” (qtd. Oyewumi), then it is not hard to understand how or why this ungendered ‘a’ is often automatically assumed to be the equivalent of the normative “he” in English. This is the point that Ngo-ngijol raises in her introductory remarks to the translation of the Basaa epic in which the French translator assumes the gendered aspects of French as normative. And there are other issues beyond these grammatical critiques. The problem for translators in African languages has epistemological implications as well: how does translation draw attention to assumptions about gender that have historically dominated the way knowledge about Africa and African women is produced and codified? To offer just one example of the way cultural context complicates issues of gender construction: in some African communities, for instance the Akamba of Eastern Kenya, woman-to-woman marriage is quite common; Childless older women take a wife who will bear children for them. Such a union challenges a normative understanding of marriage as an institution. Is it appropriate, for example, to use the terms wife/husband to characterize such a relationship? What would be the outcomes for a researcher who attempts to understand this culture with a preconceived idea of what marriage or parenthood entails? Or for one who would characterize any such marriage between two women as lesbian, as Audre Lorde did? In short, cultures and languages are not transparent. And all argument about gender issues in translation demonstrates the intractability of this fact. Recent feminist writings by African women have also challenged the privileging of gender as “a primary identity emerging out of the depths of the self [rather than] a discursive construction enunciated from multiple sites” (Simon 7). Such a view requires that we move beyond gender in the form of grammatical marking to a focus on the ideological in order to consider the temporal and spatial axes for culturally grounded gender theory (Davies 1986, Ogundipe-Leslie 1994, Nnaemeka 1992). Two recent translations of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s work offer interesting examples. In 1976, Ngugi collaborated with Ngugi wa Mirii in the Kamiirithu community theatre project which produced the text that we now have in English as I Will Marry When I Want. The text was originally performed and written in Gikuyu language before the authors came up with the English version. For the Western English reader, the statement “I will marry when I want” does not call attention to itself as a gendered utterance. After all, either a man or a woman can make this statement. But in both Kiswahili and Gikuyu, the words “ngaahika” and “Nitaolewa” convey culturally encoded gendered meaning. In Kiswahili, for example, a man would not say “nitaolewa.” Instead, he would use the agentive “nitaoa.” The subversive aspect of the title, which echoes the words of a female character in the play, becomes immediately clear to an audience familiar with these linguistic and cultural codes. A related problem, the disjuncture between grammar and ideology, confronts translators and theorists. As André Lefevere argues, “some rewritings are inspired by ideological motivations, or produced under ideological constraints, depending on whether the rewriters find themselves in agreement with the dominant ideology of their time or not” (1992, 7). When the feminist translator Wangui wa Goro undertook the translation into English of Ngugi’s Matigari ma Njiruungi ( Matigari in the English translation), she was faced with the challenge of rendering gender ambiguity in English, and her own position as an African and a feminist, coupled with elements of linguistic and cultural untranslatability, affected her approach to the source language text. Several ideological issues had an impact on the final product that English readers now have as Matigari . The most complex problem had to do with the gender of the main character, Matigari. In the original, Ngugi makes an effort to present this character as androgynous, to reflect the historical reality of the participation of both women and men in the armed anti-colonial struggles in Kenya. Such a reading is reinforced by Ngugi’s publicly stated commitment to depict in his works the participation of Kenyan women in nationalist struggles. Whereas the Gikuyu language afforded the writer enough linguistic possibilities and ambiguities for such an undertaking—and the original Gikuyu version shows evidence of Ngugi’s attempt to suggest an androgynous character—English proved less flexible. Goro talks of how she struggled with the problem of constructing Matigari in translation so as to retain some ambiguity about gender. Her search for androgynous elements in the character that could be more subtly suggested in the translation proved frustrating: she concluded that Matigari in the original text is constructed as consistently male. The central theoretical position here is clear: pronouns are not a sufficient basis on which to construct an argument about gender identity in translation because there are other culturally context-specific ways of revealing a character’s gender. A range of linguistic and cultural conventions may provide clues about gender, activating a code that is unmistakable for a culturally literate reader but nearly impossible to represent in English translation. Goro, familiar with the cultural and political context of Matigari, could not fail to decode the masculine identity of the main character. As a result, the first word in her translation is “He.” As a feminist translator, interested in the disjuncture between the author’s public statements and the literary world of Matigari, Goro proposed to use footnotes but the author turned down her request. English readers have no access to the ambiguity suggested by the Gikuyu original. To be fair to Ngugi, it is important to consider a reading of his motives and of his text that differs from Goro’s conclusion. His representation of Matigari may not be a failed project that reflects a contradiction between the author’s public ideology and his authorial practice. It may in fact reflect the writer’s awareness of dissonance between his desire to project an accurate vision of history on the one hand, and the reality that the male narrative dominates the social imaginary. Such a gap between his political vision, writerly consciousness, and the reality on the ground attests to the limits to which one can push language: Mzee is a gender-neutral term of respect, “old one.” But when used in reference to Matigari, it immediately suggests he is male, since an elderly woman character is consistently referred to as Mama mzee . Ngugi’s usage in fact reflects what is universally accepted practice: the term may be gender neutral in theory, but in actuality it is almost invariably prefaced by Mama for women, while for men mzee is used without any gendered modifier. Thus the unmarked term is masculine by default. 19 The growing presence of African women authors, translators and scholars is already changing the terms of the debate on gender roles and has begun to bring about a revision of previously prevailing assumptions in areas other than translation. An important development has occurred, for instance, in the traditionally male-dominated field of scholarship on oral epics. Male scholars, both African and non-African, have until recently argued that there are no oral epics narrated by women. This assumption of lack, echoing Ruth Finnegan’s 1971 argument that the epic does not exist in Africa, is grounded on a set of assumptions different from hers. Finnegan was motivated by her desire to prove that Africans are not primitive peoples.20 In response to her assertion, quite a number of male scholars set out to prove that the epic does exist in Africa. But they also took with them preconceptions about the epic as genre and about the gender of epic narrators. The assumption that epic is an exclusively male field has now been challenged with the publication by a Nigérienne scholar, Aissata Sidikou, of an epic text recounted by griottes. In conclusion, the importance of translation in the broadest sense, both cultural and linguistic, for knowledge production about Africa cannot be underestimated. And the ramifications and subtleties of translation, as this issue shows, are beginning to be explored in increasingly interesting ways. The routes to be traversed are many and fraught with challenges and obstacles, but the potential results of continued and increasingly sophisticated exploration promise to be important both for the African continent and for the rest of the world. Translation should in fact be seen as an occasion for exploring the diverse possibilities of African literature and life in general. There is therefore an urgent need for scholarship dealing with the ways in which shifts in cultural theory, the theory and practice of translation, academic practices, technological advances coupled with globalism promise to shape our understanding of African Studies.
Works Cited Achebe, Chinua “Racism in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays. New York: Doubleday, 1989.
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