CAPITULO III COMUNIDAD ANDINA
EL PARLAMENTO DEL MERCOSUR
CONTENTS 1.0 Introduction 2.0 Objectives 3.0 Main Content
3.1 Background to Cary‘s Mister Johnson
3.2 Negative Images of Africa in Cary‘s Mister Johnson 3.3 Chinua Achebe‘s Response to Cary‘s Mister Johnson 4.0 Conclusion
5.0 Summary
6.0 Tutor-Marked Assignment (TMA) 7.0 References/Further Reading
1.0 INTRODUCTION
Joyce Cary belongs to liberal consciousness. Although he has all the benevolence of a district administrator, he nevertheless suffers from the colonial consciousness of the coloniser. Thus, he sees Africa as a ‗Dark Continent‘ needing light. Cary‘s Mister Johnson (1969) is a novel that portrays the British imperial mind‘s preconceptions of its Nigerian colony.
Mr. Johnson and Nigeria are the protagonist and main subject of Cary‘s novel. Cary wrote mostly to a European audience that often stereotyped and discriminated against its African colonies. In the novel, Cary‘s descriptions and characterisations of Nigeria include stereotypical and prejudiced elements similar to Conrad as discussed in unit two. For instance, Mr.
Johnson is ridiculous, foolish, and laughable for his ridiculous and stereotypical attributes. Cary‘s descriptions of Mr. Johnson and the African landscape represent a stereotyped picture of an African by a white man. In this unit you are going to learn some of the negative images of Africa as portrayed in Cary‘s Mister Johnson.
3.2 Negative Images of Africa in Cary’s Mister Johnson
The satiric title of the novel itself is an appellation that connotes caricature.
Thus, ‗Mr‘ is not an adjective for respect but that of denigration. Every characterisation of Mr. Johnson is consistently satiric and every adjective used in qualifying African characters are diminishing and denigrating, for instance, ‗infantile and ‗corrupt‘. Fada, the setting of the novel, is described as ―a rubbish heap not better than a rabbit warren‖. Johnson says that England is his home and the Queen is his ideal. His naivety is never
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dispelled. In the novel, Cary‘s protagonist, Mister Johnson, is portrayed as a fool, lunatic, or thief. He appears as ―a child caught robbing the jam,‖ a skinned rabbit, ―a terror of the world,‖ and many other such exaggerated and outrageous images. This is how Cary ridiculously describes Mr.
Johnson in the first page of the novel:
Johnson is not only a stranger by accent, but by color. He is as black as a stove, almost a pure Negro, with short nose full, soft lips.
He is young, perhaps seventeen, and seems half-grown. His neck, legs and arms are much too long and thin for his small body, as narrow as a skinned rabbit‘s. He is loose-jointed like a boy, and sits with his knees up to his nose, grinning at Bamu over the stretched white cotton of his trousers. He smiles with the delighted expression of a child looking at a birthday table and says,
‗Oh, you are too pretty- a beautiful girl.
As could be seen in the above characterisation, rarely does Johnson comes across as a humanised character. He is an outcast, who is rejected by a society that does not understand him. He aspires to British image, insisting that his wife Bamu dresses like English women. He describes the novel‘s setting, Fada, as bush compared to England. For him, colonisation is necessary for Africa. He is shown spending hours writing the letter ―S‖, thus ―S‖ becomes a metaphor for his ineffectual nature. Johnson is a compulsive thief who steals not to build a house or make a fortune but to feast people erratically. His love of feasting, drinking and dancing is a distortion of African hospitality.
In the novel, the marriage ceremony by Johnson is an outright abuse of African marital process. In most African culture, the payment of dowry is a test of manhood, to ensure that the man can take cake care of his wife. But in Johnson‘s case, the parents of Bamu, his wife, took every property belonging to him in the name of dowry.
Again, and significantly too, Johnson‘s death by execution is symbolic, in that it demonstrates that the British colonial system cannot tolerate anyone or anything ―dangerous to the established order of things‖. In other words, Johnson‘s innovation and zeal must die, while Europe continues in its prejudice and erroneous preconceptions. Johnson, in the novel, has no capacity for growth or self-knowledge.
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3.3 Chinua Achebe’s Response to Cary’s Mister Johnson
As we have studied so far in this unit, Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson is a patronising novel about Africa and Africans. Ironically, Cary cited Joseph Conrad as one of his literary influences. In his book Home and Exile (2000), Achebe lashed out at Cary just as he did to Joseph Conrad as discussed in Unit 2 of this module. In his disapproval of the unsavoury Nigerian characters of Cary‘s novel, Achebe retorted:
Haven‘t I encountered this crowd before?
Perhaps in Heart of Darkness, in the Congo.
But Cary is writing about my home, Nigeria isn‘t he?‖
Achebe concludes that not only are Cary‘s representations of African people copies of Conrad‘s, but Conrad‘s are ―a hand-me-down from earlier times. He raises doubts whether Cary could have thought outside this tradition of ―colonial ideology‖ left over from the days of the slave trade.
For Achebe, Cary‘s novel, Mister Johnson, remains a source of frustration, especially in its characterisations. In Home and Exile Achebe acknowledges that:
…we can all differ as to the exact point where good writing becomes overwhelmed by racial cliché. But overwhelmed or undermined, literature is always badly served when an author‘s artistic insight yields place to stereotype and malice. And it becomes doubly offensive when such a work is arrogantly proffered to you as your story (41).
Many African scholars consider Cary as a failed imitator of Conrad and the novel, a ―racist-colonialist representation of Africa‖. As Laura Tenpenny (2011) observes, Cary‘s Nigerian characters serve ―as an implicit justification of the British civilising mission‖ and the novel‘s protagonist, Johnson, is the ―classic colonial stereotype‖ and ―the botched African product of the imperial civilising mission‖.
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4.0 CONCLUSION
In this unit, you learnt that Cary's presentation of Africans in the novel Mister Johnson is questionable at best and racist at worst. Cary's portrayal of his main character is patronising and filled with racists undertones. For instance, Mr. Johnson is ridiculous, foolish, and laughable for his ridiculous and stereotypical attributes. Cary‘s descriptions of Mr. Johnson and the African landscape represent a stereotyped picture of an African by a white man.
6.0 SUMMARY
In Mister Johnson, Cary‘s protagonist is portrayed as a fool, lunatic, or thief. He appears as ―a child caught robbing the jam,‖ a skinned rabbit, ―a terror of the world,‖ and many other such exaggerated and outrageous images. Achebe is of the view that Cary‘s representations of African people are copies of Joseph Conrad‘s.
6.0 TUTOR-MARKED ASSIGNMENT (TMA)
Mister Johnson is the ―classic colonial stereotype‖. Critically examine the validity of this assertion, drawing instances from the novel.
7.0 REFERENCES/FURTHER READING
Achebe, Chinua. (2000). Home and Exile. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Achebe, Chinua.(2009). ―An Image of Africa.‖ In Things Fall Apart. (Ed.) Francis Abiola Irele. New York: Norton.
Burrows, John and Alex Hamilton (1954). ―Joyce Cary: The Art of Fiction.‖ .The Paris Review. No. 7, Fall-Winter.
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5071/the- art-offiction-no-7-joyce-cary.
Cary, Joyce. (1962). Mister Johnson. New York: Time.
Conrad, Joseph. (1995). Heart of Darkness. London: Penguin.
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Harris, Michael. (1992). ―The Cultural Clash: Joyce Cary and Chinua Achebe.‖ Outsiders and Insiders: Perspectives of Third World Culture in British and Postcolonial Fiction. New York: Peter Language Literature Resource Center.
Padurang, Mala. (2009). ―Chinua Achebe and the ‗African Experience‘.‖
Things Fall Apart. (Ed). Francis Abiola Irele. New York: Norton, 343-358.
Phillips, Caryl. (2009). ―Was Joseph Conrad Really a Racist.‖ Things Fall Apart. (Ed). Francis Abiola Irele. New York: Norton, 200-208.
Tenpenny, Laura K. (2011). "Nigerian Representations in Joyce Cary‘s Mister Johnson". University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects.
http://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_chanhonoproj/1482.
Walsh, Chris. (2004). ―A Balance of Stories, or Pay-Back: Chinua Achebe, Joyce Cary, and the Literature of Africa.‖ Emerging Perspectives on Chinua Achebe. (Ed). Ernest N. Emenyonu. Vol. 1. Trenton, NJ:
Africa World: 107-20.