Stephanie C. Horton

Sankawulo, Ancestor: African Consciousness, Social Memory and Narratives of Self

“For like blood, griots were expected to circulate throughout the social body, with power to heal or sicken it, according as they used their words and songs to diminish social conflicts or to exacerbate them.” - Amadou Hampate Bậ, from, “The Living Tradition”, General History of Africa (1981)

“. . . the writer serves in a number of capacities. Firstly, he serves as the spokesman for his people; secondly, he serves as a recorder and an interpreter of their experience; and finally, he helps to chart for his people a reasonable direction or destiny. If we attach any meaning or value to the great writers of the past and the present, it is because they are saying what we would like to say, and because they throw light on our own experience, showing the connections in our activities. And this gives us the compelling desire to live with a purpose. I see no other role which the black and African writer can usefully play in our changing society apart from this.” - Sankawulo (1984)

The dead never did go away;
They are in the glimmering shadow
and the darkening shade.
The dead are not underground;
They are in the trembling tree,
the groaning wood;
in flowing water
as in still waters.
They are in the hut and in the crowd:
The dead are not extinct. - Birago Diop (1960)

Hungering for a good book to lose myself in one night, I was loaned a collection of stories written by Wilton Sankawulo called The Marriage of Wisdom, and Other Tales by one Matthew, a taciturn University of Liberia student. I never heard Matthew speak any language but English, and the Jewish apostle’s name was the only one he offered when he came to our family compound, sometime in the early seventies, to work for my uncle in exchange for tuition, food, small change and sleeping space.

Matthew was the keeper of the keys in my uncle’s frequent absences to the rooms in his apartment where the comic books, record albums and videos were. It paid to stay on Matthew’s good side, and I managed to do that, despite the fact that he never, ever smiled at me, and rarely spoke. The solution was meat.

I and my sister lived upstairs with our grandmother while my uncle lived downstairs in a separate, self-contained apartment where, under orders, Matthew ruled. And so I gave Matthew the thick, assorted chunks of chicken, pig, goat, cow, from my food each day before I ate, in exchange for his reciprocal cooperation. Not a great sacrifice for me as I only liked seafood, but that was how I crossed the monkey bridge to gain Matthew’s attention.

Through our interaction, I discovered that not only was Matthew studious, but like me, he also read stories and novels. And the reverence with which I touched his books if I found one left alone on a table or chair, irreverently trespassing boundaries and touching his belongings, somehow led us into an unspoken arrangement; so that once in a while, if I asked with enough humility or eagerness to touch his heart, Matthew loaned me books. His African Authors Only Collection, all males, mostly published by Heinemann (African Writers Series)-the famous publishing house I later learned habitually ripped off African writers, Sankawulo among them-was securely locked in his black iron trunk next to the camp bed (folded flat in the daytime) in the dim, narrow back hallway where he slept.

Until Matthew, the only other reading addict around was my grandmother, occupied with her academic and religious texts. I had gone through all the classic masterpieces of African American literature that my grandmother had in her library, from Phyllis Wheatley to Paul Lawrence Dunbar on to the Harlem Renaissance. I regularly read Time and Newsweek, that my father subscribed to, and his Playboy magazines, where I’d read an excerpt of Malcolm X’s autobiography, Huey Newton, James Baldwin, Angela Davis, and other famous Black American writers and personalities. And I had my own small library of American and European authored folktales, novels and stories that I read and reread; Jane Austen, Nancy Drew, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Lewis Carroll, Charles Dickens, the Brothers Grimm . . . These books took me outside of myself soul traveling into a wide, vast world of wonders, marvels, strange cruelties. These were stories into which I disappeared, an understanding of human nature and alternate cultures and societies transposed on my consciousness. But I found myself seeing myself and my reality, my own environment and my world, starkly, sensitized, splintering and reforming thought, activating self knowledge, self awareness and self consciousness, through Matthew’s books: Ayi Kwei Armah, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Steve Biko, Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye, Ousmane Sembene, Amilicar Cabral  . . . And from Sankawulo through Matthew I learned that Liberia had literature, a canon, an entire heterarchical corpus of stories beyond the Spider tales told in every home-though never at school, and though we desperately needed to analyze those Spider stories in the classroom for their philosophy that ridiculed and exposed selfishness, ego, and greed, predominant traits in our society.

I consumed Sankawulo’s book overnight, The Marriage of Wisdom, and Other Tales, feeling a heightened awareness, the first “real real” Liberian Liberian stories I’d ever read, and the next day returned it and was loaned another book, this one razor sharp dystopian realism by Ayi Kwei Armah. My heart leapt in expectation when I saw the slim Heinemann book with orange and black stripes in Matthew’s hand held out to me, the picture of that serious writer on the back cover.

“Where is Wilton Sankawulo?” I asked Matthew, stressing all the wrong syllables, horribly mispronouncing and mangling the author’s name. The Sankawulo book still pulsed in my bloodstream. The unknown and imagined had suddenly become known, and familiar places I had been and passed through upcountry took on a different dimension. A movie began in my mind that I could simply walk into. I thought Sankawulo had to live somewhere outside of Liberia. It simply did not occur to me that Liberians living inside Liberia wrote such stories about Liberia. I had never read any. Everything good to read came from “away”.

I was alienated within and from my own country, well versed in all things British and American, European, unable to properly pronounce Sankawulo’s name. Matthew’s low laugh was a derisive scoff at my ignorance. Scorn rearranged his features, half twisting his mouth. As usual, he didn’t bother responding with actual words. His only reaction was to hand me that Ayi Kwei Armah novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. He eyed me appraisingly, as if to gauge my ability to actually become a full-fleshed, thinking African being. But he had given me another book, which I meekly and gratefully accepted, nervous, bearing the full force of his sarcasm, intensely aware of his superiority now that I was reading his books, the similarity of his circumstances to those protagonists I sided with, seeing myself as he saw me: ignorant, unAfrican, culturally excised.

It was evident to me, Matthew despised us. In his sardonic sideway looks, I discerned resentment, judgment, condemnation, naked contempt. I intuited that he despised me for simply being who I was, a child of that family, a hopeless case in his eyes no matter how many books I read, born to dominate, a future changeling from child into arrogant woman with a selfish sense of entitlement, privilege, and a callous, unfeeling heart like the characters in his books whose counterparts I now recognized in my own world. I had had no words to describe them before plunging into books, but now I recognized their false and superficial pride, their spiritual emptiness. He despised the family for many reasons, one being that he slept on an uncomfortable camp bed in the hallway while we lived guarded by well fed dogs, and all around us in the sprawling ghetto on land we owned, people were trapped, compressed as if into one huge indistinguishable mass, sweating and malnourished inside tight, hot, dark spaces-eight or more people living in dank structures called houses smaller than the size of one room in our house-squeezed like prisoners in jail between mildewed zinc, wood or concrete block walls without lights, air, running water, kitchens or bathrooms. And I had friends who lived there among all those people that I visited often; and through Matthew’s scorching eyes, I became aware of other accusatory stares, stabbing glances, when I moved through that labyrinthine territory.

I began to dream of Matthew’s contemptuous eyes multiplied by a hundred thousand accusing eyes directed at me. Matthew’s books, Matthew’s eyes, pierced the veil behind which I lived apart from the squalor around me. I saw how I was a part of that squalor, and Matthew communicated without words that my individual soul was mine and of no consequence to him. But he did introduce me to continental African literature, though he left a brutal teacher’s imprint on my psyche – a true colonial initiation, a corruption and inversion of what should have been a deep kinship connection. And he also started me set on a lifelong journey, an immersion into literature that reflected my own internal and external landscape, my tangled emotional and psychological confusion, the contradictions of my personal history, my colonial socialization. And he prepared me as well to meet and somewhat understand a complicated man of tremendous talent and complex contradictions who himself lived multiple lives: the literary icon, Wilton Sankawulo, the same.

I am a griot . . . master in the art of eloquence . . . we are vessels of speech, we are repositories which harbour secrets many centuries old . . . we are the memory . . . I teach kings the history of their ancestors so that the lives of the ancients might serve them as an example. For the world is old, but the future springs from the past. . . . Listen then .  . . children of the black people . . . – D.T. Niane

Matthew was no griot, and then again perhaps he was, but Sankawulo definitely was. Matthew wore resentment on his face. Sankawulo often wore a mask. The griot’s way of knowledge was in his blood balancing memory, flattery, eloquence, wit, intelligence, strategy, survival. But Sankawulo wore his Kpelle Africanness unselfconsciously, like healthy skin. One does not have obsessive need to crow to others about familial skin inseparable from their being, if that sheath is fed with blood pumped from a sheltered heart. That skin has always been there, sun-warmed, night-rubbed by loving hands, even if sometimes those hands are one’s own. The soul within that skin that is aware of the magnificence from which it comes does not accept any external diminution of its own sense of self. Sankawulo had no inclination to prove his humanity or disprove another’s. He knew he belonged to eternity. He knew suffering was transient. He knew the poetry in the stories of his beginnings, the power, and he carried always that song.

He was in Texas teaching at a community college when I first reached him to ask that he send some of his stories to the journal. Any trepidation I felt before that first call (that the very idea of an electronic journal would seem absurd to him, given his emphasis on publishing books) immediately dissipated at the warmth in his voice. He was so appreciative that I had read and had interest in his work. I discovered that he was a 68 year old man unlike many his age who understood the power of computers and the Internet. He communicated by email almost daily. I found him to be humble, remarkable, witty, and incredibly ambitious to be known, understood and remembered as an African Liberian writer. I knew that he allowed me into his confidence to gain that end. And so our communion began.

He was writing, always writing, pleased to talk about his work, but in and out of hospital. He would soon relocate with his wife to join their daughter and her family in the southern Commonwealth where I lived then in self-indulgent mostly peaceful isolation. His novel, Sundown At Dawn: A Liberian Odyssey, had just been published. I finally met the iconic personality in person and we began talking on the phone, sometimes everyday for hours, he shaping our conversations, I an avid listener and student. He spoke of his regret at wasting time serving in government when he could have been writing. He talked about hoping to see his lifelong dream come to fruition: a Liberian owned publishing house that put out Liberian authored books of high quality. As he grew more comfortable with me, he set me to reading and commenting on his unpublished manuscripts, and I revisited his books and essays to sharpen the questions I felt compelling curiosity to pose to our most famous living literary writer.

Contextualizing Sankawulo was and is not easy. The subconsciousness of a colonized mind, a colonial education, is always present in the Liberian persona. Filtering through one’s own colonization experience to deconstruct another person’s is never easy. Sankawulo himself dealt with this only in literature, never in conversation. Through his upcountry missionary education, we see him in the 50s and 60s becoming a theologian, an evangelist, the open path to upward mobility, walking a tightrope between the life of a Poro member and the imposed Christian religion, endeavoring to mediate that divide. Ultimately, in his work, the Poro side proved to be a much more compelling subject. We see him in the 70s after receiving a terminal Master of Fine Arts degree become a reporter in Monrovia: never confrontational, careful, polite, safe. We see him become a government official and college professor in the 80s. In the 90s, we see him become interim Head of State. It is only in his writing that his deep-seated anger and intellectual criticism about the hierarchical establishment and white supremacy emerge. And because he was not taken seriously, neither by the emerging nationwide opposition movement nor the entrenched elites – the former because he was not a fiery spokesman “in the cause of the people”, the latter, because he was a well behaved Kpelle man who wrote harmless animal stories, he was left alone to express in writing thoughts and ideals that became more and more taut, detached, revelatory, deep and observant.

“Indeed, Liberians have come to believe that foreign aid is a substitute and not a supplement (as it should be) to their own efforts. And all this is because the founders of the nation never perceived Liberia as a homeland but rather as a farmland where they may gather produce for consumption in America and other countries . . . The pen is still mightier than the sword. We must tell the truth about our country in our works . . . We should, of course, maintain love and respect for our people so that we may remain focused on the issues rather than on personalities. Our people do the wrong thing because they never saw good examples to follow. Our duty is to convince them that the goodness within them can come to fruition without external factors.” - Sankawulo (2005)

Sankawulo’s public life of contradictions against the private road he set out to conquer as a writer revolutionized my ever evolving thinking about the perils of the Liberian literary terrain, the writer’s role and questions of vocation, craft, language, culture and identity – all overused terms that don’t quite hold the heavy weight behind them.  I had always gotten stuck articulating this complexity, my head filled with processed thoughts like a zombie victim of mind control, my emotions conflicted, my imagination stymied and arrested. What brought on this mental psychosis that I and other writers suffered was of course, (1) the simplistic, pre-packaged colonial ideation we are fed from the cradle on, reinforced by a self-alienating, anti-African educational system, and (2) the simplified answer to the Liberian experience; the rancor, conflicts and tensions of the Settler vs. Indigenous divide, itself another grand Liberian lie to my thinking, stoked and inflamed by coloniality, produced out of a holocaust no one ever publicly alludes to or examines in critical discourse.

It seemed to me that Sankawulo had found a way to circumvent all that nonsense without apparent fear or anguish, writing against the grain, departing from the script, presenting in his stories and novels an indigenous world cohesive, orderly, ancient as time, present as breath, steeped in traditional culture and spirituality. He upholds in his work that African consciousness, that social memory. Sankawulo’s novels and stories draw us back into our own Liberian world. He sought to redirect our consciousness by conscientizing/decolonizing all of us who were alienated-both city dwellers and rural dwellers educated to think with a Euroamerican consciousness, an either/or mentality, a divide and conquer reality-re-educating us to the wisdom, philosophy, traditions, beauty, humanity – and the human foibles and imperfections found not only in Monrovia but also in traditional society. And in this way Sankawulo launched a quiet cultural revolution.

I have heard 100% pure blooded indigenous writers reduce Sankawulo to a mere folklorist whose tales were not original but instead pilfered from the great epic oral tradition. I have heard him described as a sellout, an “Uncle Tom”, a weak man who squandered the opportunity to make revolution. In his widely published 1984 essay, “The Role of the Black and African Writer in the Changing African Society”, Sankawulo butts heads with Achebe-the unassailable Achebe-by praising Joyce Cary’s novel, Mister Johnson, referring to Cary as a “visionary analyst of the African situation”, and the novel as “an irony, portraying the impotence of western civilization and Christianity [in Africa] as a means of social redemption at their face value.” About Cary’s Mister Johnson, Chinua Achebe says, “I know around ‘51, ‘52, I was quite certain that I was going to try my hand at writing, and one of the things that set me thinking was Joyce Cary’s novel, set in Nigeria, Mister Johnson, which was praised so much, and it was clear to me that it was a most superficial picture of -not only of the country-but even of the Nigerian character, and so I thought if this was famous, then perhaps someone ought to look at this from the inside” ( Duerden Dennis, and Cosmo Pieterse, eds. African Writers Talking: A Collection of Radio Interviews. London: Heinemann, 1972).

The essay was commissioned by the Overseas Monograph Collection. This tells us something about Sankawulo, the consummate pleaser, who would “read” you and tell you what you wanted to hear, and then go about writing what he really wanted to say. It behooves us to look at western criticism and western education in the context of Sankawulo’s age and time, his lack of access to African scholarly material, his coming into the spotlight against that backstory as an isolated Liberian writer, an African writer, to understand the perceived contradictions. For it is in the power of his storytelling and his personal essays and private correspondence where we see the distillation of his ideals and ideas. He promoted an African identity. He promoted self sufficiency. He promoted egalitarianism. He promoted communal achievement over individual success. He promoted interethnic respect. He believed in himself. He decried hegemonic hierarchal structures. He had a perfect understanding of his role as a writer:

In discussing the role which the black and African writer should play in the changing African society, it is important to mention something about the writer’s responsibility to society. This is important because in Africa today, the writer is expected to be at once a social reformer, a politician, a defender of the black man’s cause, an entertainer, a teacher, and so forth. Many of our writers succumb to the temptation of assuming these roles, often at the expense of the aims of their profession. As a result, most of what they write turns out to be mere propaganda or an experiment with language.

Of course, the writing profession is most liberal -in that a writer has the freedom to choose his own subject matter, unless he is prevented from doing so by his own society; in which case he can still exercise his freedom by resorting to such literary forms that will carry the same message symbolically. But whatever subject matter the writer chooses, and whatever manner in which he treats that subject – these are by-products of his chief concern, which is to bear witness of human experience with the aim of adding meaning, freedom and dignity to that experience.

But again, we see the contradiction in that yes, for a time, he did exactly what he cautioned writers not to do. Here now perhaps the cautionary journey of an intellectual creative writer who steps outside of his element, passion, and calling. Sankawulo did become, for a season, “a social reformer” working with Tolbert, energized by the call to higher heights; “a politician”, used, manipulated, taken in during his tenure as Chairman of the Council of State, interim president; “a defender of the black man’s cause . . . a teacher” who accepted the uneducated Doe as president and sought to impact Doe’s leadership by taking him on as a student. Yet undeniably in his work, his novels, his stories, he bore “witness of human experience with the aim of adding meaning, freedom and dignity to that experience.” And one can see if one looks deeper than the surface of clouded judgment that he attempted to do this in each of his roles as politician, teacher, defender, government worker, professor, reformer. So are the contradictions really a contradiction? What he taught us was to write against and through our own imperfections, human weaknesses and errors; to find the beauty, the dignity, in everyday lives. He gave us permission to bear witness to our own experiences and to continuously try to make sense of and transform that reality if needs be, regardless of background, class, origin, educational achievement; free of guilt, shame, of circumstances and events we played no part in creating or stoking. He taught us to try and make a difference and be tolerant, clever, strategic: “Of course, the writing profession is most liberal -in that a writer has the freedom to choose his own subject matter, unless he is prevented from doing so by his own society; in which case he can still exercise his freedom by resorting to such literary forms that will carry the same message symbolically.”

Reading his 2005 novel Sundown At Dawn: A Liberian Odyssey, we see comparative echoes of the protagonist Dougba Senfenui’s hard push into the kwi world by his father, as in Sankawulo’s own life experience chronicled in his “LIFE IS ETERNAL: Essay in Memory of My Father”, as he writes about his father’s death: “I left him dying and went back to school because he wanted it that way. I should know book to be able to write it with my right hand and my left hand, know book so whenever anyone woke me in the middle of the night and said something in English, I would know what he meant. Book meant everything . . .”

Dougba Senfenui was lonely, feeling he belonged nowhere, that there was no place he could be completely at ease, totally unaware that his story was mirrored across the African continent in a million lives. His is a story of tragic self-sacrifice. Sankawulo, too, was lonely, aware that he was understood by few. This was a man who constantly walked perilous old roads, colonialist roads, clannish village roads, clearing new paths for us coming behind to pass through and more easily pave our own way. This was a man who ascended to the top of the hierarchy based on meekness of character, brainpower, that he was recognized in the first place and seen to be neutral, held on based on hope, publicly atoned for his human errors and weaknesses, seeking redemption in us, in the gifts of literature he offered, and each time he felt himself perched on the edge and about to descend precipitously, he wrote deeper still against the erasure, the decline and descent:

The greatest lesson life has taught me is that love betrays because it is often misplaced. I’m happy I know what to love, though this knowledge comes too late to do me any good. We often learn life’s lessons with empty hands . . . I’ve learned to love the solace and balm of the clean refreshing air of dark evergreen forests riddled with grunting animals and birds singing sweet melodies in flight and on treetops. I love clear brooks, creeks, and rivers teeming with carp rolling down granite slopes at noonday in woody mountains. I love the fallow soil and silver rain that make crops grow, and the heavy downpour of rain-times which quench the earth’s thirst after the telling heat of the year. I love the radiant blue of the dry-time sky. I love God the most! (2006)

Classic Sankawulo. His narrative of self telling all of us politely where to go when we failed him, misunderstood him; telling us where he’s coming from and what’s most important to him in old age, with such clean poetic imagery and strong sentiments.

I dream of Sankawulo’s vision multiplied in a hundred thousand hearts sharing his dream of a sociopolitical revolution that begins through cultural socialization on the individual level and enlivens the communal. Sankawulo’s books, Sankawulo’s life, pierce the veil behind which we live inseparable from the deafricanization around us. He communicates through his words that each individual Liberian soul is of consequence and has a duty to work toward cultural reeducation. I’m reminded of these lines from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a poet Sankawulo would have studied and may have admired:

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light . . .

But to rage was not Sankawulo’s way.

Hard was the struggle Sankawulo waged to be heard and understood as a literary Liberian voice, an African voice, until his very last breath. I know, for I was witness to that struggle during his last years on earth. All of his work must be collected and published in one complete volume for us to truly examine and understand the measure and worth of the life of the man and his work to our country. It must happen for generations of Liberians to study and know Gbakolo Sengbe Sankawulo. This writer unlike others must not disappear and be buried in western libraries, inaccessible to those he wrote for. Literary critics with the knowing sensitivity and Africanist consciousness to understand him will come forth, grounded in the knowledge of that African immanence and interconnectivity already retrieved by such scholars and writers as Cheikh Anta Diop, Théophile Obenga, Ayi Kwei Armah, who knew and know Africa as one great river of commutual exoteric narratives flowing backward into ancient social memory and progressing forward carrying that blood re-memory into the future. For as Sankawulo reminded us, and as we know all Africa believes of our venerable Ancestors, “life is eternal and death will never make it perishable.”