purpose, always aware of the continent as a place to make money.
Contemporary theories of discourse may make us doubt the possibility of ever coming to terms with anything 'in itself'; nevertheless that was what Kipling and Forster tried to do with India. Such effort is rarely made in Africanist fiction. Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief(1932) depends for its comedy on the mutual incomprehension of Europe and Africa. At the birth control gala, for example, the Africans see condoms as the 'Emperor's juju,' a fetish guaranteeing many children. Controlling births means making sure there are lots of them. But Waugh's dark -648- continent is primarily intended to make a point about Europe; like the South American scenes in A Handful of Dust (1934), it throws the spotlight on 'those other savages at home.' There may be no meeting between the cultures, but still Waugh's Britain is not that different from Africa. His prose invites his readers to turn away in revulsion from the cannibals' 'glistening backs heaving and shimmering' as they dance around the fire, but it also reminds them that one of those cannibals has come home to England. It too is one of what Conrad called the 'dark places of the earth,' and though that darkness may be obscured by its own light, it becomes visible enough when Europeans are placed against an African background.
Graham Greene's African novels use the continent in a similar way, taking it as the Manichean counterpart to the 'sinless graceless chromium world' of Western modernity. The physically healthy protagonist of A Burnt-Out Case (1962), for example, comes to an African leper colony because Europe no longer offers the state of spiritual extremity he needs. As such Greene's Africa is indistinguishable from the other overheated landscapes in which he sets his work: Haiti, Vietnam, Mexico-the world collectively known as 'Greeneland.' Greene has protested against this way of seeing his work, arguing that each separate place has been 'carefully and accurately described.' But the documentary details make little difference. The mood of the fly-blown bungalows in which his characters live stays much the same, whatever the setting. The Heart of the Matter (1949) is one of Greene's richest books, but even there Africa merely provides the landscape against which to explore the protagonist's spiritual difficulties. The genre scenes through which he presents Henry Scobie's stark, bare life as a police officer in Sierra Leone are very fine, as such scenes always are in Greene's work: they depict his miserable marriage, his relations with the Syrian trader Yusef, the endless drinking, and the 'flying ants scattering their wings over the table.' And the author even manages to give a heroic quality to Scobie's stoic performance of a difficult job in a day when the grand rhetoric of empire has vanished. But Africa remains in the background, a land of heat and vultures that merely intensifies Greene's tale of Scobie's guilty Catholicism and eventual suicide.
Neither Greene nor Waugh makes a real effort to write about colonialism as a structure of consciousness; neither of them is greatly interested in Africa as Africa. Yet to note that is also to stress the way their books form part of the discourse Miller describes, in which the conti-649- nent figures as but an 'empty slate, written on by others.' Joyce Cary does make the attempt, but his once greatly admired novels of colonial administration in Nigeria now serve primarily to remind us of the Manichean qualities of Africanist discourse. The best known of them, Mister Johnson (1939), is a portrait of a teenaged government clerk who uses his official status as a bargaining chip in negotiations, first for a bride and then for a loan. Johnson is charming, his high spirits are infectious, and he is also capable of sustained hard work. But he is, finally, a thief and a murderer, and Cary connects that disaster to his cultural displacement-to his fondness for gin and Western suits and his insistence that he is 'an English gentleman… dat King of England is my king.' The novel's other African characters see his behavior as ludicruous, even mad. Yet Cary manages to suggest that Johnson is in some ways typical: typical in his childlikeness, a function not of his youth but of his Africanness; typical too in his inability to seem anything but absurd in his fondness for English culture, a prototype of what Naipaul would later call a 'mimic man.' It is little wonder, then, that the first generation of Nigerian writers in English attacked Cary's work so strongly. The desire to show that Africa is not as Cary had seen it provided the motive force for Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease (1960); and Wole Soyinka's portraits of his parents' generation in Ake (1981) and Isara (1989) effectively challenge it as well.
Doris Lessing offers a richer body of work in her first novel,
Even those of Lessing's characters who work for the government are closer to Haggard's than they are to Kipling's, for they have come to Africa for the sake of a good job and a comfortable life, rather than out of any sense of mission. And such characters figure in the work of more recent novelists as well, as international experts or businessmen, or even the zoologists of William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach (1990). That emphasis on the colonial balance sheet makes the novelist's Africa a more polyglot world than the Raj, peopled by Belgians and Russians in Heart of Darkness, Middle Eastern shopkeepers in Waugh and Greene, more Belgians along with East Indian traders in Naipaul. Africanist novels, that is, tend to deal with 'the international community,' with small pockets of foreign nationals living in hot countries where they may have positions of privilege but do not necessarily rule. Perhaps for such characters the particular country or continent in which they live does not much matter: the unnamed African nation of A Bend in the River might as well be the Haiti of Greene's Comedians (1966) or the Costaguana of Conrad's Nostromo (1904). They are all dangerous, poor, and corrupt, and they all offer the chance to make a fortune. Such novels are not about the processes of imperial rule so much as about the general question of relations between north and south; though the economy they chart is now as often one of guilt as it is of capital. And indeed it is Nostromo as much as Heart of Darkness that lies behind most Africanist novels, and in particular behind the large body of recent fiction that Euro-American writers have set in a postcolonial Africa. For Nostromo is the great novel of economic imperialism: of the international interests whose investments must be protected, whether they are moral, political, or financial; and of what that protection costs. Africanist fiction is not on the whole as strong as the literature the British produced about the Raj. But because those investments did not vanish with independence, it is likely to provide a better model for the novels of a neocolonial age. -651-
'The empires of our time were short-lived,' Naipaul writes in The Mimic Men (1967), 'but they have altered the world for ever; their passing away is their least significant feature.' And Naipaul's own novels both chart that alteration and are themselves a product of it. The descendant of Hindus who came to Trinidad as indentured laborers, Naipaul has become over the last thirty-five years one of the most prominent figures in what was at first called 'Commonwealth literature' and is now known as postcolonial literature. For one of the most important things those empires left behind were their languages, and the new literatures in English have been especially vital. The field is too large to survey here, though its importance is suggested by the Nobel Prizes awarded to the Nigerian Soyinka in 1986, the South African Nadine Gordimer in 1991, and the West Indian Derek Walcott in 1992. But this chapter would be incomplete if it did not deal, however briefly, with the way in which the novel has depicted the world after the formal end of colonialism, and in particular with the way in which, as Rushdie puts it, 'the empire [now] writes back.'
Naipaul's two Africanist novels, In a Free State (1971) and A Bend in the River, testify to what he describes as the great restlessness of our age, a restlessness whose mass migrations and cultural upheavals were created by imperialism, but which seems only to have increased as the empires themselves have receded. And that has been Rushdie's material as well. Few of their characters have received the sort of education that makes Scott's Hari Kumar into a 'brown-skinned Englishman,' though the term does have some reference to their own biographies. But both writers build their work around the issues such a character suggests, exploring the constantly shifting identities that imperialism has created, and the question of what it might mean, in the words of Kipling's Daniel Dravot, to «grow» to be English. Rushdie's Saladin Chamcha can even be seen as a postcolonial version of Kim: a
