Fatherhood in literature

A few days ago on the 19th of June was Father’s Day. I am told that Father’s Day is a holiday of honouring fatherhood and paternal bonds, as well as the influence of fathers in society. They say it would take until 1972 for the holiday to get its full due, when President Richard Nixon signed a proclamation establishing Father’s Day on the third Sunday of June.

Fatherhood and manhood are exciting terms amongst literary scholars because literature has spoken a lot about fatherhood and manhood for ages. According to African wisdom, fatherhood is the condition of being a natural male parent to a child and, including the character, authority and responsibilities of bringing up a child with the use of food and values.

Manhood is the state of being an adult male, usually distinguished from childhood. In African wisdom, a family is seen as the most basic and appropriate institution for the socio-economic survival, prosperity and security of human beings. And this necessitates fatherhood.

I have noted with pleasure that the late Chinua Achebe is often called “the father of African literature.” Wring in The New Yorker once, Philip Gourevitch actually says “the fact that Achebe must be remembered as not only the father but the godfather of modern African literature, owed at least as much to the decades he spent as the editor of Heinemann’s African Writers Series.

In that capacity, Achebe served as the discoverer, mentor, patron, and presenter-to-the-world of so many of the now-classic African authors of the latter half of the 20th century. The series’ orange-spined, generously inexpensive paperbacks carried a stamp of excellence that drew readers everywhere to essential works by writers as varied as Kenneth Kaunda, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Dennis Brutus, Tayeb Salih, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Ousmane Sembene, Wole Soyinka, and Nadine Gordimer, to name but a few: it is an extraordinary legacy.”

On the other hand the Wylie Agency, considered the most powerful and influential literary agency in the world, reported that their client, Professor Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, which celebrated its 64th year of continuous publication in 2012, “has sold between 15 million and 20 million copies worldwide in 60 languages.”

In Things Fall Apart itself, Achebe writes about a father who has become very well known in African literature. He is one Okwonkwo of Umuofia. Okonkwo is a wealthy and respected warrior of the Umuofia clan, a lower Nigerian tribe that is part of a consortium of nine connected villages.

It is said in the novel that he is haunted by the actions of Unoka, his cowardly and spendthrift father, who died in disrepute, leaving behind many village debts unsettled. In response, Okonkwo becomes a father, clansman, warrior, farmer, and family provider extraordinaire.

He has a 12-year-old son named Nwoye whom he finds lazy. Okonkwo worries that Nwoye will end up a failure like Unoka. This troubles Okwonkwo a great deal.

Okonkwo’s fear of weakness and failure, which stemmed from his father, leads to the horrid and unmerited treatment he gives to those around him and eventually prompts his downfall. The fear of being anything like his father has been within Okonkwo since he was a young child.

The novel says “Okonkwo ruled his household with a heavy hand. His wives, especially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and so did his little children.”

During the Week of Peace, Okonkwo notices that his youngest wife, Ojiugo, has left her hut to have her hair braided without having cooked dinner. He beats her for her negligence, shamefully breaking the peace of the sacred week in a transgression known as nso-ani.

When his second wife, Ekwefi, admits to taking the leaves, Okonkwo beats her severely to release his pent-up anger. Then he sends for his rusty gun to go hunting — Okonkwo is not a hunter nor is he skilled with a gun. When Ekwefi mumbles about “guns that never shot,” he grabs his gun, aims it at her, and pulls the trigger. Although it goes off, she is not injured. Okonkwo sighs and walks away with the gun.

In a settlement with a neighbouring tribe, Umuofia wins a virgin and a 15-year-old boy. Okonkwo takes charge of the boy, Ikemefuna, and finds an ideal son in him. Nwoye likewise forms a strong attachment to the newcomer. Despite his fondness for Ikemefuna and despite the fact that the boy begins to call him “father,” Okonkwo does not let himself show any affection for him.

Ogbuefi Ezeudu, a respected village elder, informs Okonkwo in private that the Oracle has said that Ikemefuna must be killed. He tells Okonkwo that because Ikemefuna calls him “father,” Okonkwo should not take part in the boy’s death. Okonkwo lies to Ikemefuna, telling him that they must return him to his home village. Nwoye bursts into tears.

As he walks with the men of Umuofia, Ikemefuna thinks about seeing his mother. After several hours of walking, some of Okonkwo’s clansmen attack the boy with machetes. Ikemefuna runs to Okonkwo for help. But Okonkwo, who doesn’t wish to look weak in front of his fellow tribesmen, cuts the boy down despite the Oracle’s admonishment. When Okonkwo returns home, Nwoye deduces that his friend is dead.

Okwonkwo is a strong and uncompromising father who exudes manhood all over the place. He does not like Nwoye apparently for being weak and effeminate. Nwoye does not like his father. He also does not like the violence and heavy handedness that he sees around him and he receives constant beatings from his father. Eventually Nwoye converts to Christianity and plunges Okonkwo into deep misery.

However, in the case of the Nama Award winning novel Bones, by Chenjerai Hove, the black fathers who are workers on the white man’s farms in Africa actually lose their proper sense of fatherhood and manhood.

We have the case of a man called Marume and his wife Marita, working on a white man’s farm called Manyepo. While Marita and her husband Marume are poor and oppressed workers on a white man’s farm, Marume’s tragedy is constructed in such a way that it becomes graver than Marita’s. Marita is at the mercy of the whiteman, Manyepo because the white man historically defeats Marume and all that an African husband and man stands for.

Manyepo the white man can beat up Marume at will and in front of his wife and children. Manyepo can tell Marume what to do or not do with his family. Manyepo rearranges Marume’s life. That is why one of the ironies in Bones is that Manyepo pretends to want to control Marita through Marume, the husband, thereby demonstrating the whiteman’s guilt.

For Manyepo, it is not important to control Marita. It has been done already through dominating Marume by pushing them off his ancestral lands and setting farms on them. The Rhodesian land tenure system has pushed the likes of Marume off their land.

It is also clear that part of Marita’s frustration is due to the fact that all the black men around her have been made powerless by one man. She refers to the men on the farm as ‘castrated’. The irony of Marita’s case is that her husband is called Marume (a corruption of murume, a Shona word for man) when colonialism has actually brought him down to a thing that is neither man nor woman.

In the end, Marita comes across as a woman with no real husband. It is becoming true that society is threatened when masculinity is lost. Society can only be saved if men reclaim their authority and reassert their masculinity.

Marume is only an appendage to Marita. Marita regards Marume with pity. When she eventually leaves the farm to go and look for her son in the city, Marita does not discuss the matter with Marume. She just goes. Implied is that Marita blames Marume for being a victim and men in oppressed societies are usually viewed this way by the wives and women.

Marume himself says of Marita: “She looks me in the face like a policeman arresting a thief…She stares at me and asks me to take it as it is because she has already packed her belongings.’ In some moments she talks to him the way a mother would talk to her inadequate son. The narrative seems to suggest that Marita takes an aggressive stance and fights alone solely from realising that her man has been turned woman.

It will be argued here that both slavery and colonialism take a lot from the black men folk more than meets the eye. However that can be more difficult to read especially if the observer remains narrowly rooted on the fact that slavery and colonialism are more devastating to women than men – the notion of double burden. In line with that, one should read Orlando Patterson’s thesis on this matter with both curiosity and a sense of reawakening:

“I think that it is not a myth that African-American women have been more burdened (by slavery) than African-American men, but it is perhaps time to think again more carefully about the nature of the burdens that each gender has had to bear. Being burdened, having to work harder that the others, is not, in itself, necessarily a bad thing… those burdens of women (in slavery) have always been, at least partly generative, empowering and humanizing… (because) while slavery viciously undermined the two most important male gender roles, that of father and husband, it simply could not destroy the role of mother…”

Suggested above by Patterson is the fact that under most oppressive conditions, manhood/fatherhood tends to fall away faster than womanhood/fatherhood. The reason is that the invader tends to displace original fatherhood and feminize it as a sole signal of conquest.

It follows that the process of turning man into slave is, to a great extent, akin to the process of turning man into woman! In traditional societies the beheading of the chief of a conquered group by the invaders, seemed a logical thing to do. Even the taking over, or sometimes the open raping of the conquered man’s wife is a symbol of the rude ascension of the new fathers.

The issue of effeminate men in Bones is in sharp contrast to what happens in Nadine Gordimer’s novel of 1981, July’s People, which restores the manhood of a black man at the expense of white folk. July’s People is a futurist novel inspired by the guerilla-Marxist-Leninist kind of Independence in neighbouring Zimbabwe in 1980.

Gordimer imagines a sudden South African future of more active urban black uprising that sees the whites flee in all directions. The novel is set during a fictional civil war in which black South Africans have violently overturned the system of apartheid.

Bam Smales, a successful white Johannesburg architect, his wife Maureen and their three children, are rescued by their servant of 15 years, a black man called July who takes them to his rural home 600 km away in their small car.

In this novel, there is an outstanding relationship between Maureen the white madam and her black houseboy, July. The novel takes the colonials from the infrastructural and racial comfort of urban to a distant African village.
Here is a reverse case where the Smales actually find themselves in an unfamiliar territory.

There is a way in which the major supposition is that July and the Smales switch positions and that the Smales are at the mercy of both July and July’s village. Within weeks of settling in the African village, Maureen’s naked body becomes, “ungroomed and ungroomable” that her husband cries, Oh my God!” when he looks at it during their now fast dwindling intimacy.

Without a regular bath, the privacy of the urban bedroom and the toiletry of civilization, Bam, Maureen’s husband actually looks like a “primate.” The whites are now at an equal level with the usually haggard African villagers.
With the help of the moment, July gradually stands up to his former employers.

He is now more of their father! This involves July ceasing to be a houseboy. He now asks his own wife to wash the clothes for the whites instead of washing them himself as he used to do back in Johannesburg.

July can also be seen taking over the white people’s car without their permission. July can now dispossess Bam of his gun and helping Daniel the Sowetan to rev it and drive it around the village. July also pleads for mercy with the Chief on behalf of Bam. He is now able to stand up to Maureen until she becomes his potential sex partner.

In such an unfamiliar territory and circumstances filled with distress, Maureen is preoccupied with July’s presence. She sometimes wonders about July’s town women whom they have left behind. She wonders whether July craves her too in the manner of a jealousy lover! Maureen and July do not share a sexual experience but their private interactions are laced with conscious eroticism.

Removed from the public sphere of the racial city, Maureen imagines that she is in a love triangle involving Bam and July, whom she silently calls her “frog Prince and saviour.”

In their third meeting, Maureen feels that it is natural that she is meeting July out in the bush. They talk about ordinary matters of the past and as July brings his right fist onto his chest, the thud sounds as realistic as the fear in her chest. This is the first time Maureen ever feels the aura of a natural man. Her husband, the text claims, is only “a presence in circumstances outside those the marriage was contracted for.”