When I was approached by Zed with a view to writing this Foreword, I agreed without hesitation. I remembered my enthusiasm for Land, Freedom and Fiction when it first appeared in 1985, and was eager to return to it. This was not so much to see whether and how it bore up some thirty years later – for this was relatively assured – but more to take a look across that time at its inner shape and the specific nature of its engagement. I am delighted to say the book has borne up extremely well, with much to offer in both the ‘then’ and the ‘now’.
Land, Freedom and Fiction is a book extraordinarily attuned to the impress of history, politics and ideology upon literature. In that respect it is filled with time as its subject matter, here specifically the history of the Land and Freedom movement in Kenya, and its fictional and non-fictional representations. With this working method in mind, it seems apposite to apply a similar lens to Maughan-Brown’s study itself. What were its own ‘markings’ in time, the nature of its engagements and preoccupations? In such a view we might find that a book such as this is valuable not despite those markings but precisely because of them.
It seems to me there are five ‘moments’ (in the vectoral sense) underlying the moment (in the temporal sense) of this study. The first, of course, concerns the specific history and literature it undertakes to examine, in Kenya from the 1950s through to the 1970s, turning on the images, myths, representations and realities of what was termed ‘Mau Mau’. The second had to do with the prominence, in the early 1980s, of specific forms of theory deriving from the work of Louis Althusser, which had a major impact across fields from political philosophy to literary criticism. The third – since this book was originally a doctoral thesis undertaken at the University of Sussex – was the context of England in the 1980s, in the midst of Thatcherism. This reality, the dark afterlife of the British Empire, seemed not a million miles divorced from its earlier incarnations in the repressive environs of Kenya. Nor was it divorced from the fourth moment I would discern here, the reality of neo-colonial development in Kenya and other African countries, so evident in the concerns of this book. The fifth ‘moment’ concerned a different country entirely, South Africa, where David Maughan-Brown returned to live and where he completed the book. The resonance of ‘Kenya’ for ‘South Africa’ and vice versa would have been readily apparent; perspectives on the one would have been irresistible in relation to the other.
This I believe was part of my original fascination with Land, Freedom and Fiction. Like David Maughan-Brown I was a South African who had written a doctoral thesis in England, in my case on what I called ‘history from the inside’ in the novels of Nadine Gordimer. Though Maughan-Brown studied (for the most part) popular fiction, while Gordimer was more overtly literary, we had many of the same preoccupations, on the nature and shape of historical consciousness, on the workings of ideology, on the role of fiction in crafting the world it took on the job of writing. Our minds would have been filled with the debates of the time, of Althusser vs Thompson, of Macherey in relation to Goldmann. In South Africa there was a generation of social historians undertaking extraordinarily innovative work. How could, or would, ours hold up as literary critics? In just a few years, deconstruction would become the prevailing orthodoxy, loosening literature from the kind of politics that seemed so critical. J. M. Coetzee would object vociferously to the view that literature was somehow a ‘supplement’ to history. Soon we would be in the realm of a postcolonial theory and its attendant notions of hybridity that had seemingly lost its sense of the urgency of the political. As another South African, Neil Lazarus, has argued, postcolonial theory had lost touch with the impulses of its origins.
But not in Maughan-Brown’s book, and this was why I was keen to look into the mirror of Land, Freedom and Fiction and see what I would find there. There is certainly much to find. One immediately admirable aspect of the book is the sheer amount of work that has gone into it, whether in areas of literary theory, colonial history, the political economy of Kenya or the writings, non-fictional and fictional, that came out of it. This, in other words, is a major study, the kind that lasts, as evidenced in Zed’s decision to republish it. One also has to admire Maughan-Brown’s sheer tenacity and analytical stamina when faced with the livid accounts of ‘Mau-Mau’ produced in colonial fiction and non-fiction. At times, reading descriptions of supposed ‘Mau Mau’ depravity, featuring sexuality and violence in a promiscuous mix, is like an extended tour through the inner swamp of the colonial unconscious. In this light, Maughan-Brown gives us a taxonomy of the terminology and fictive structures which constitute and reinforce a governing world view, all in astute and highly nuanced readings. Most nuanced of all is the test case of what we might call reading for ideology, in his account of Ngugi’s A Grain of Wheat. Here we see a writer in transition in what Maughan-Brown acutely calls a ‘crisis text’, as Ngugi makes his way from an individualist aesthetic governed by prevailing literary orthodoxies and pedagogies towards more collective manifestations.
From a distance of thirty years, one sees in Land, Freedom and Freedom a kind of structural scientism regarding the relations between politics, ideology and fiction that might not be possible in exactly the same terms nowadays. The view of this book is that fiction is a production of ideology, and it is true to that guiding idea throughout. For my part, I would be as interested in what fiction tells us that other sources and forms of imaginative production (including ideology) cannot, but there is virtue in a strong thought argued through to conclusion. Yet though perspectives will inevitably differ or change over time, one thing that has not changed is the political urgency that underlies this book, and which underlies its continuing relevance and resonance now. We live in the era of Brexit, of Trump, of refugees, of climate change, of huge disparities and unevenness throughout the world, of fake news and mythology in resurgent forms. It is a world that has a direct line of connection to what happened in Kenya in the 1950s. In that respect, as we find new ways to analyse and respond to our surroundings, there is enormous inspiration in a study such as Land, Freedom and Fiction, and a legacy to draw on. It is our sixth moment across time.
Stephen Clingman
February 2017