P-J Ezeh

            The literary world lost a man of enormous talents with the death on Wednesday 27 March 1991 of Graham Greene. Greene was born in England in 1904, lived mostly in France in his last years, but in his writing career he was first and foremost a citizen of the world. His kindred was humanity. Greene’s views on Africa were not very popular ones among his own people. But then that does not mean that those views are accurate reflections of the position of indigenous Africans on the situations in the continent. It happens that Greene was addicted, as it were, to opposition. He did not agree even with himself. There is hardly any of his novels which he was satisfied with (Greene 1982: 269), for instance. In 1926 he left the Church of England, the English official sect, and joined the Catholic Church, carrying with him his customary dissension. The Vatican at one time banned The Power and the Glory, his novel on the anti-clerical purge in one of the southern states of Mexico.

            There is no attempt to question Greene’s right to hold dissenting views; this proem only serves to place his views on the African condition in their proper perspective. For his personal intricate psychoartistic reasons, Greene was almost always satisfied with the unusual, and the African condition provided him with some of the bases he needed to counter popular Western views on international relations. “The motive of a journey deserves a little attention,” he states, for instance, in the opening chapter of Journey Without Maps (Greene 1971: 20). “It is not the fully conscious mind which chooses West Africa in preference to Switzerland.” Davidson Nicol (1981: 497- 499) narrates. “Thirty years ago the late Ooni Aderemi I of Ife … met Graham Greene and described him as a ‘good and kindly gentleman.’”

            Greene set five of his stories of book-length – three fictional, two factual - on Africa: The Heart of the Matter (fiction); A Burnt-Out Case (fiction); The Human Factor (fiction); In Search Of A Character (nonfiction); and Journey Without Maps (nonfiction). The central character in each of the novels is a European; Scobie in The Heart of the Matter  and Querry in A Burnt-out case.   

            Henry Scobie is a devout Catholic whose deep devotion to his duties as the most senior officer in colonial wartime West Africa may only be rivaled by his acute moral sensibilities. He is barely able to satisfy the interminable caprices of a very demanding wife when another woman enters his life in a very inevitable circumstance. The young lady sets sail for West Africa with the husband to whom she has just been married but there is a shipwreck. The man dies and the woman is rescued to a hospital where she recovers from her injuries at last. As the most senior policeman in the territory, Scobie is busy attending to the accident victims. Compassion (Greene will prefer “pity”) drives him to increase his interest in the stranded young widow. He deliberately violates his Catholic tenet on marriage, to a great mental agony for himself, but for the happiness of the widow. He will not do anything to hurt his wife either. A point is reached when his struggle to ensure that each of the two women is happy destroys him. He kills himself.

            In this novel, the only African character who is fully presented to readers is Ali, Scobie’s “boy” (servant). The minor African characters have no nobler stations either. They are low-ranking policemen speaking halting English, boys (servants) of other colonial officials; women in brothels, etc, Ali is his own. He is presented as very faithful and honest but only because of the way he serves Scobie.

            The same superior-subordinate picture is again presented about Europeans and Africans in the other major fiction set in Africa, A Burnt-Out Case, and in The Human Factor which is set partly in South Africa of the apartheid era, England and Moscow of the Soviet Cold-War period. Querry is an architect of world renown who also has had all the pleasure of life. He gets a surfeit of it all and is struck by a terrible indifference. He escapes to a leper camp in Congo, and opts for a new low-profile existence free from the glory he has hitherto been acquainted with. He applies himself to the work in the leper camp with all devotion and self-denigration but the European community soon discovers his true identity. A bored young lady who is the wife of a high-ranking colonial officer who admires Querry goes one dangerous step further with her infatuation for the famous architect. As a result, her husband’s own admiration turns a fatal hatred and he murders Querry.

            Here as in Heart of the Matter the Africans are the underdogs to the Europeans or otherwise helpless people seeking for assistance of the Europeans. Deo Gratias is the most prominent of the Africans, and like in Heart of the Matter he is a “boy” (servant) to the central character. Again like Ali, he is faithful and honest, ready even to risk his life to save that of his master. He is ugly and severely deformed from a previous leprosy. The Human Factor does not lend itself to such a straightforward exegesis being as it is of a rather complex plot. All the same, the major African character, Sarah, Maurice Castle’s illegal wife as defined by the apartheid law, is also in an underdog   position and must be protected by the British double agent who in the end escapes to Moscow. Sarah manages to balance her sentiments in favour of her husband, child and country but Maurice’s stronger attachments are to the personal relationships he shared in their authorship.

                        As far as these three novels go, the image of Africa does not rise beyond that of a passive victim of exploitation. Europe is cast in the improbable mould of both the exploiter and the benefactor. No writer anywhere has ever been completely separated from his background, which may be an asset or liability depending on how it is employed in the creative process.

            Greene’s political neutrality gave him the type of perception that abuts on prophetic insight. The average observer is surprised today at the ideological hobnobbing going on between the United States and states of the former Soviet Union but in those grim pre-perestroika days Greene has said in 1969: “The two super powers ... are allies in all but name” (Stratford 1977: 585).

            If one places Greene’s African-related fictions in the colonial environments in which they are set, the excuse, however delicate, for his controversial characterization of Africans begins to emerge. Greene’s narrative technique is eminently journalistic; the line between fiction and facts in his works is consistently too thin.

            As an artist, Greene is a paradox; he is too original for the liking of the Establishments anywhere in the world. “If I love or if I hate”, he makes a character say in Our Man In Havana (Greene 1958: 186), “let me love or hate as an individual.” Many will consider an originality of views that does not patronize any sectional sentiments as such the first ingredient of a great work. After all, what new message can come from merely restating Einstein’s relativity theory to a meeting of physics professors, or reciting an African lay to a grandmother who has always lived in a rural town on the continent? One contributor to Sonntag’s (1976: 9-24) book on modern Israeli writing believes that those writers who have made the greatest impact on the Jewish state are the ones who do not merely echo popular opinion. “If Satan had literary gifts,” one critic is quoted as saying about Amos Oz, one of the foremost writers in that part of the world, “he would write like Amos Oz”, (Sonntag 1976: 16). The French writer/thinker Andre Gide advocated for the kind of desectionalized attitude considered merely idealistic at the time but which Greene effortlessly made his stock-in-trade. Gide called this approach deracinement, a metaphor that evokes uprooting of a plant; elsewhere he had used the term depaysement - denationalization - (Nersoyan 1969: 22, 23).

            No less a towering literary phenomenon than our own Chinua Achebe has said that no serious writer can surrender to popular opinion just because it happens to be popular opinion. Killam (1973) quotes the Nigerian novelist as saying: “It is important to say that no self-respecting writer will take dictation from his audience. He must remain free to disagree with his society and go into rebellion against it if need be.”

            Greene’s works, their few, if serious, flaws notwithstanding, are a remarkable example of what an artist can achieve if he refuses to allow popular opinion or politics to dictate to him. The imperfections are evidence that he was human. When his countryman William Golding won the Nobel Prize in 1983, one commentator in the American Time magazine criticized the choice by the Swedish Academy, givers of the prize, on the ground that Golding wasn’t a better writer than Greene and a few other names. In 1985 I went to Stockholm and asked to be told what disqualified Greene and some African writers. Professor Lars Gyllenstein, the Permanent Secretary of the Academy, did not have much to say on Greene’s case except that his best works were written a long time ago.

            “I regard him as an important writer...,” Gyllenstein said on a personal note in a tape-recorded interview with me in his office on 26 November, 1985. “But The Heart of the Matter was published in the early (19)50’s, or something. I think the book would have been given the prize in the 50’s or in the 60’s.”

            Greene missed the Nobel Prize, to be sure, but some of his works will remain green in spite of, human factor in them. And time of course will give them a noble place.

References

Greene, Graham, 1968. The Heart of the Matter. London: Heinemann Educational Books.

Greene, Graham, 1971a. Journey Without Maps. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Greene, Graham, 1971b. Our Man In Havana. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Greene, Graham, 1978. The Human Factor. Hammondsworth: Penguin Books.

Greene, Graham, 1982. Ways of Escape. New York, Washington: Square Press.

Killam, G. D. (ed.), 1977. African Writers on African Writing. London: Heinemann  Educational Books.

Nersoyan, H. J., 1969. Andre Gide -- The Theism of An Atheist. New York: Syracuse University Press.

Nicol, Davison, 1981. “Greene’s Love of Africa” West Africa, No. 3319, March

Sonntag, Jacob, 1976. New Writing from Israel. London: Transworld Publishers.

Stratford, Philip. (ed.), 1977. The Portable Graham Greene. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.