Question 3: With detailed reference to at least two African novels, write an informed essay on the subject: The Tropes

of Disability in African Prose Fiction. ABSTRACT This essay examine some African novels social vision about the economic, political and material conditions of contemporary African society by centrally representing the trope of disability in some selected novels, to underscore the fact that the current African societies are impoverished and stratified amidst plenty. Emanating from the present social stratification are complications that breed the emergence of a class struggle between the aristocrats represented by the politicians, leaders and the proletariat represented by the disable, hence making disability in the fictional works a signifier of the debauchery and disillusionment in Africa.

The Trope of Disability in African Prose Fiction Ayo Kehinde (2009) describes disability as a polysemic term that differs from one culture to another culture. According to him, this claim is in line with that of Susan Whyte and Benedicte Ingstad (1995) and Ato Quayson (1999) who opine that any attempt to universalize the category disabled runs into conceptual problems of the most fundamental sort (5). Quayson and Kehinde emphasize that both Susan Whyte and Benedicte Ingstad, however, categorize disability into two: manifest physical disability and less manifest forms of disability. Manifest disability has to do with physical and obvious disability for instance, leprosy and blindness, while less manifest are virtually not visible and they include; insanity, deafness, and sometimes loss of manhood. Erving Goffman (1963) and Quayson (1999) dwell perceptively on the cultural dimension to disability which well in line with Whyte and Ingstad Quayson (1999) therefore sees disability as both a cultural and physical problem, and he attempts a deconstruction of Robert Murphy (1987) who claimed from personal experience that stereotypes on the disabled impact on the psyches of the disabled themselves, generating problems with their self-esteem. It is this same view that Frantz Fanon (1965) holds that the displacement of the people in Africa tends to results to; a mass of humanity. People of the shanty town, the horde of starving man, who are uprooted from their tribe and class. By tropes of disability we mean disability used in a figurative way, usually for rhetorical effect. It may be of interest to establish that in African fiction, according to (Quayson, 1999; Kehinde, 2011) there are three ways by which tropes of disability is presented: The first one is the Lacanian conceptual apparatus for theorizing what happens in the encounter with the disabled; the second one is the discursive ways in which the disabled people are figured or depicted or characterized in Africa fiction; and the third one is the contextualization of disability

Building on the work of literary disability theorists Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Lennard Davis, and David Mitchell & Sharon Snyder, Quayson argues that disability is unique in that it is an "excessive sign." It demands interpretation whenever it appears but, at the same time, it often functions to indicate meaning in other registers - those of race, class, gender, and so forth. In the course of this book Quayson teaches us to be suspicious of the over-signification that would ascribe metaphorical meaning to real disabilities, and one surely sees the ethical charge of this suspicion. But something peculiar seems to happen around disability within the literary text: the vehicle itself actually does what it is supposed to do and imputes some quality to the tenor. Like disability (and indeed, like anything else), gender, race, and sexuality can be tropes. Disability is such a powerful and irreducible signifier, in other words, that it winds up being constitutive of textual elements at every conceivable turn, even in texts that are not ostensibly about disability like Okphewos The Last Duty. Yet it resists easy interpretation or containment. As Quayson writes, "we have to understand disability's resonance on a multiplicity of levels simultaneously: disability acts as a threshold or focal point from which various vectors of the text may be examined" (28). Fortunately, Quayson's close readings of Beckett's Molloy, Morrison's Paradise and Sula, Soyinka's The Strong Breed and Madmen and Specialists, and Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, clarify and confirm his conceptual arguments. Therefore, Kehinde (2003) opine that what is often found in postcolonial writings about disabled people is an uneasy relationship between the disabled and the able-bodied. There are also attempts to link historical epochs with the conditions of disabled people. Ato Quaysons illuminative comments on the importance and status of disabled people in postcolonial literary works are worth quoting at details at this juncture: The presence of disabled people in post-colonial writing marks more than just the recognition of their obvious presence in the real

world of postcolonial existence and the fact that, in most cases , national economies woefully fail to take care of them. It means much more than that. It also marks the sense of a major problematic, which is nothing less than the difficult encounter with history itselfWhat is important to note, however, is that the encounter with the disabled in postcolonial writing is as much a struggle to transcend the nightmare of history (65-66). However, Kehinde noted that in postcolonial and postmodern texts, thematic foci have shifted from the centre to the hitherto marginalized plane of discourse (the margin) the disabled, the poor, the disempowered, the third world, etc. Thus, disability is no longer conceived in postmodern/postcolonial texts as a marginal case as we have in the case of Aminatas The Beggars Strike. This paper therefore examines the representation of disability in Aminata Sow Falls The Beggars Strike, Sembene Ousmanes Xala and Isidore Okphewos The Last Duty with regard to the dissonant relationship between the archetypal disabled, and the able-bodied people in the society. Karl Marx Marxism, most especially the distinction between the upper class and the lower class, is very germane to this discourse. The human state of in the neo-colonial Africa is characterized by antagonism, which results from all levels of alienation (i.e. economic, political, psychological and physical etc). Sigmund Freuds analysis of human unconscious is also relevant as a frame work of this study. Beneath every human skin as Freud posited is the unconscious which resides in the nervous system of the body. This unconscious is often equated with the animalistic principle in humans that has wrecked so much havoc in humanity through hubristic tendencies achieved through selfishness, dehumanization, man inhumanity to man among other actions that debases the morality of other man. This tendency is articulated in the constant conflict between the have and have not in the novels. Tropes of disability in Aminata Sow Falls The Beggars Strike, Isidore Okpewhos The Last Duty, and Sembene Ousmanes Xala

As earlier argued disability as employed in African literature could only be understood when it signify and explain certain situations in which it is use. The trope of disability covers wider and different socio-cultural context and we tend to show that in this essay. As such, the three texts we have selected for consideration are well founded on the springboard of disability. Human disabilities explored in this work are physical, psychological and metaphorical. Class struggle and dis/ability This use of disability as metaphorical vehicle for the effects of the capitalist division of labour characterizes an ethical thread in Marxist thought. In the same thought, Quayson endorsement of social model of disability makes us understand that it is not the person, but rather society which is disabled. This is a useful dialectical reversal. If we take the social model of disability in the broadest sense, we might be led, circuitously, to Marx, and to identify capitalism with disabled society in a new sense. It is only when social being is equated with labour power, with the ability to perform economically productive work that disability can be understood from the social angle. Balogun, P O support this view; Socio-political structure is determined by the performances of various classes at work and the nature of their relationships in the society (2007, 72). Socially, the representation of the beggar in The Beggars Strike can be explained base on their inability to work, i.e. not being a productive member of the society. In the text, the upper class is represented by the top government officers such as Mour Ndaiye, Keba Dabo and the minister while the lower class is represented by the beggars. Here, the unproductiveness and the presume harmful presence of the beggars are met with constant threat by the upper class which is demonstrated with the policy (to clean-up the capital from the beggars) implemented through police tactics of harassment, physical abuse, and imprisonment of beggars so as to

promote tourism and ensure public hygiene. This is fully illustrated in the text as presented below: You realize, the latter went on, their presence is harmful to the prestige of our country, they are the running score which should be hidden at any rate in the capital (p 2-3)

While on the other hand, the lower class (beggars) see their profession a necessity and that without them (beggars), the religious injunction cannot be fulfilled. They might not be as productive as Mour Ndaiye and Keba Dabo, but they believe that begging is; Thats what religion says; when we beg, we just claim what is our due (61) it is interesting to note that the people with explicit physical infirmities beyond doubt, display maverick intelligence and demonstrate the ability to call the high profile people to order. In Okpewhos The Last Duty, Odibo is a cripple and messenger to the honourable Chief Toje. Often scoffed by his master who flays him with denigrating insults, Odibo conditions his intellect to accept that he is nothing. He arrives at this belief about himself in spite of the fact that he is an active worker at Chief Tojes rubber plantation and later supplies foodstuffs on Tojes behalf to the soldiers during the course of the raging war between the Simbian and Urukpe forces. He says, I know I am nothing. Iknow I have nothing. But why does he keep making me feel so bad? (6) According to Eustace Palmer (2008), Odibos statement is the language of the man who is totally lacking in confidence, who is so completely aware of his inadequacy that he wishes to efface himself. It is the style of the man who feels small because he has been made to feel small. It is an index of his own sense of "nothingness" (3). In Xala, the condition persist as business men and politicians like El Hadji Abdou, Kader Beye and the President of the Chamber of commerce and industry represent the upper men who oppressed the beggars that constitute the lower class. Hence, the class as shown in the novel leads a privilege

affluent, oppressive, protected and comfortable life. The class lives off the fruits of the labour of the masses. It derives is wealth by sadistically cheating the common man who because of the economic disability have been relegated beyond background. Disability and Post-independence African society In the novels, disability is also employed to capture the disillusioned and the crippled state of African society which is often characterized by continued ethnic distrust, religious crisis,

poverty, corruption, low literacy rate, poor infrastructural facilities, intermittent military incursion, irresponsive and irresponsible leadership that has often been considered as the bane of most African countries after independence. These poor socio-economic indices therefore have contributed in no way to subjugating and emasculating the masses. Right from the beginning of Okpewhos The Last Duty, the readers are introduced into a world enveloped with war, a universal as well as a natural constraint on the human rights of a people. As if this is not enough, a dusk to dawn curfew is imposed on the supposedly free citizens of Urukpe. Hence, the atmosphere presented in The Last Duty depicts a crippled society where every functioning faculty of the societal systems is tamped with. Little wonder some privileged individuals like chief Toje and the sergeant could exhibit their animalistic tendencies just because the system of the society is malfunctioning. The case in Falls The Beggars Strike poses no difference as a society polarized by means is presented with each experiencing incapacitation to a desired end. Therefore, the readers are confronted with a world incapacitated to achieve a desired goal. In The Beggars' Strike the pressure to remove beggars from the city originates outside the internal dynamic of the social system in the form of foreign currency and the values of those who bring it. While the social condition of the beggars is not put into considerations, the change Mour Ndiaye oversees and his assistant, Keba Dabo, engineers is not a structural change at all, but a

cosmetic change. Their commitment is not to eliminate the institution of begging or probably set aside skills development and employment packages for them, which would be an alternative means of survival, but to hide beggars from tourists. Mour Ndiaye argues that the beggars "are a running sore which must be kept hidden, at any rate in the Capital" (Fall, 1986: 2). As this novel progress it becomes apparent that as long as beggars are not provided with social economic opportunities, begging will thus remain a stable feature of post-independence Africa social system. Sembene presented an unstable economic and political that is prominent in postindependence Senegal society where the business men and politicians symbolize the priviledge class against the adverse conditions of the masses. Sembene comments on the socio-psychology of the national middle class that: They had come together from different sectors of the business community to form the Businesss Group in order to combat the invasion of foreign intereststheir anxiety to constitute a social class of their own had increased their combatively, tingeing it with xenophobia (p.1) These are the characteristics of the businessmen in the post-independence Senegal and by extension in the other post-independence African nation-state. Fanon describe the lopsided; or the rather cripple state of African nations through the gaucheness often display by the middle class. In his The Wretched of the Earth (1965), Fanon argues that the African middle class is a mere economic and political stooge. He also opines that it has nothing to contribute to progressive revolutionary change. Ironically, the likes of El Hadji Beye deem it feet to use the opportunity to gain control of the countrys economy (p, 1) though legitimate but done at the expense of the lower estate. For this reason, the life of the proletariat does not change for better. El Hadjis secretary sales lady (Madam Diouf), Modu and Alasene, his two chauffeur(s), represent the state of this class. The secretary we are told, has no salary for months. Modu and Alasene, the drivers work restlessly without pay too.

The beggars and the other destitute also represent the proletariat in the novel. Ousmanes juxtaposition of El Hadji Beyes affluence and the mystic life of the destitute life portray the post-independence Senegal as a replica of the colonial setting. Though, this is a pun on the traditional society, there is much to it. The beggar, even with his handicap nature, still suffers humiliation from the oppressors. El Hadji Beye denies the beggar the right to his heritage. His hatred for the beggar is overtly and covertly expressed. Even to the point that; the monotonous scrape of a beggars chanting on the other side of the road got on his nerves (p.29) Yay Bineta conventionally known as Badyen also exposes the betrayal of trust that is dominant in the disabled African society after independence. Her inspiration to become a national bourgeois is rooted in her clientele role to the upper class. As a matter of fact, she is a pimp in the novel. She proposes NGone to El Hadji for marriage for a price since El Hadji gives them a thousand Francs to pay for a taxi home on one thier visits to him. (p.7) This is the real class attitude of the privileged post-independence Africans. They sell their fellow blacks for their selfish ends. Manhood in tropes of dis/ability Disability has also been used to examine the meaning of manhood in The Last Duty. For most of the characters manhood is closely associated with male pride or male sexual power and ones inability to perform such sexual power is deemed incapacitated: "Otherwise, how can a man reconcile himself to that title when it seems very clear to him that he no longer possesses, has completely loststrange as it may sound to a normal mindthat power which gives the title its very definition" (24). In Toje's eyes, therefore, Odibo the cripple is doubly deficient in the quality of manhood; he is physically maimed since he has only one arm, but because of this deficiency he couldn't possibly be attractive to a woman and so he is apparently automatically

bereft of sexual potency; he is a small and insignificant man. Toje therefore scoffs at Odibo's manhood. (Palmer, 51) The irony is that in spite of his position and power, essential ingredients for manhood as far as he is concerned, Toje, by his own definition, is not really a man, since he has lost his sexual potency. But far from realizing it he continues to insult other men he considers small and to insist on his former prerogatives as a "big" man. Thus, in spite of Odibo's lowly status and his loss of an arm, Aku realizes quite early that he is a real man: "As he came nearer and nearer, I noticed that he was bare to the waist, with his cloth wrapped round his loin. He came closer and closer to my bed. I could now see him in full view. The stump of what should have been his left arm. His imposing build. The swell of his shoulders and of the biceps of his right arm. The taper of his trunk He was every inch a manhis manhood scarcely faulted by the unfortunate loss of an arm" (162). However, his disability is adequately compensated for by his ability to mate successfully with Aku. Disability as perceived here there means that the loss of certain physical parts and powers does not necessarily mean the total erosion of one's manhood. By surrendering herself to the lowly Odibo, Aku has taught the latter that real manliness has nothing to do with social status, nor does it have anything to do with physical deformity. This discovery is liberating for Odibo who now sees the world anew, therefore signals the beginning of Odibos gradual move away from Toje and the discovery is truly liberating: "How much does it take to be a man, knowing that someone takes good healthy notice of your manhood, and you come out and receive the fresh, beautiful morning air full in your face without fearing that some other man would take you to task for it? . . . After that woman let me into her body, and I experienced a release of my long pent-up passion, I felt my whole bodymy whole personalityloosen, and my entire being change. Now when Toje calls me a useless mass I am simply going to swallow his words without a care" (179-180)

But though he has moved significantly away from the effects of Toje's brainwashing and has shed much of the latter's conception of "manhood," he still shares Toje's notion that manhood has a lot to do with sexual potency and therefore masculine pride. Similarly, the magnetic correlation between manhood and the human power through the ability to arouse the appetite for sex and further expand its elasticity is reflected in the character of Mour Ndiaye, a civil servant The Beggars Strike with a soaring profile who decides to have another wife, Sine (a teenager) due to his sudden inflated financial and social status. This view is also related to Tojes conventional view about manhood. For him real manhood has something to do with social importance. The real man is the big man. When Toje says, "It's a curse to be a small man" (119), he really means that a man without any social standing cannot really talk of his manhood because no matter what is his integrity and honesty, he couldn't really earn the respect of the community. Despite a front of wealth and stability, El Hadji's economic status in Xala crumbles to dust before his eyes. His close friends and business partners desert him when he poses a threat to their economic positions, and his wives exhibit similar faithlessness. In the novel, El Hadji's status as a member of the economic elite, as well as his manhood, is therefore put into question. El Hadji's affliction, Xala (or impotence) not only present a form of disability that is rooted from his inability to successfully mate with his new wife, but it also symbolizes his lack of power in both the economic and social world. Power and Role Reversal in the tropes of dis/ability Power is presented in the novels as a tool which everybody possesses irrespective of their physical challenges. In most cases, the power possessed by the disabled turns out to be the beginning of their liberation. However, their eventual liberation led to role reversal in the society thereby heightening their symbolic impotence. The changing relations between Odibo and Toje

are a very interesting feature of Okphewos The Last Duty. At the start we see that the abusive and arrogant Toje is utterly contemptuous of and insensitive toward the suffering Odibo largely because he considers him to be something less than a man, a mere creature. He because of this scorns his manhood and calls him names in front of Aku. As far as he is concerned Odibo is little better than a eunuch. Odibo, for his part, almost accepts Toje's judgment about his manhood, convinces himself that he must be useless, and resigns himself to total subservience to Toje. This started to change; Toje, however, continues to speak brusquely to Odibo, not realizing the full implications of the deflation that is taking place in his personality consequent on his failure to achieve consummation with Aku, and failing to see that Odibo's perception of him is gradually changing (Palmer, p.8). The major turning point in relations between the two men comes after Odibo's successful mating with Aku, something that Toje, the "complete" man, had failed to achieve. Their positions are now, in a sense, completely reversed due to the sudden sexual power of Odibo. Thus, Odibo has superlatively demonstrated his manhood where Toje clearly has not. This epoch of Odibo signifies the reclamation of his self-esteem as he is able to confidently stand neck-to-neck with Chief Toje. The language in which Odibo narrates his confrontation with Toje is now a far cry from that of the early Odibo. It is now almost like the language of the early Toje without the bluster and the pompous self-importance. It is the tough, hard-hitting, no-nonsense language of a man who is strong and knows it; Toje!I call threatenly, drawing him back with a vehement jerk. He whirls around at me with bloodshot eyes and a frothing mouth. But he can see that I am staring back at him with equal menace. (212). In The Beggars Strike, the unbearable situation prompts the beggars to organize a strike in which they refuse to return to the city streets to receive donations from the selfish Mour Ndaiye. Mour who stands as the instrument used by the government to eradicate the beggars from the

city, now opts out due to selfish interest to give sacrifice to the power so as to become the vice president. The beggars are able to demand their pound of flesh by frustrating the selfish ploys of Ndiaye to get them back to the streets after he has initially dislodged from their usual location: What! Its out of question. It is completely out of question! Just because he threw his money at us, we have to give in to his whims! No! if he threw his money about. Its because hed got his pocket full (p.97). Their refusal to take heed to Ndiayes warning crashes his lofty ambition and aspiration of becoming the vice-president. Hence, the beggars, in spite of their disabilities fight back in protest against the draconian policy of the government given forceful implementation by the top civil servant Mour Ndiaye who coincidentally has to suffer the brunt of the indignation. The novel portrays the beggars as an integral part of the society's social structure, and how their removal creates profound disruptions in people's everyday lives. At the end of Xala, the religious and economic structures upon which El Hadji has built his life are shown to be flawed. El Hadji's manipulations of the Muslim faith and the tenet of polygamy eventually result in his undoing. Ousmane reveals the true nature of gender relations in Senegal, a world in which it is widely assumed (especially by westerners) that women are powerless (psychologically disabled) under the domination of men. In fact, the female characters in Xala, most notably El Hadji's wives and the domineering figure of Yay Bineta, exhibit the power that many women in fact yield over their male counterparts. El Hadji's marriage to a third wife, N'Gone, occurs not as a result of his own volition, but rather due to the scheming of the Bayden (Yay Bineta). A headstrong and eloquent woman, Yay Bineta is able to manipulate El Hadji into accepting a third bride. Playing a game in which she was "well-versed," In her exchanges with El Hadji, the Bayden alternates from sweet and subtle hints to outrageous accusations in order to pressure the man. During one encounter she baits him, "You're afraid of women! Your wives

make the decisions; wear the trousers in your house, don't they? Why don't you come and see us?"(7). N'Gone's mother provides yet another example of the powerful woman. Her husband, Old Babacar, admits that "his wife's authority was limitless," and Friends of his own age-group all said that it was Babacar's wife who wore the trousers in the home..."(6) In this way, these men (Old Babacar and El Hadji) faces a new dimension of feministic archetype, confrontationally unconventional and eccentric to thier previous orientation to woman submissiveness. Their wives are embodiment of the new generation of women with disdain for male chauvinism. Thus the threat of being perceived as feminine and disabled becomes a strong factor in the weakness of these men and becomes a tool in the hands of others. A strong delineation of the strength of power and role reversal is also present through the beggars, who are the blind, the lame, and the generally disabled. Sembene slips them into the story and tries not to draw attention to them too early, but when he uses the song of the beggars to further the narration of the story, their presence is amplified. Also, we take solace in their potential as revolutionary. They now exercise even power as it the beggars ritual that purifies El Hadji. Just like the beggars and Odibo had done in Beggars Strike and The Last Duty respectively, the beggars in Xala insult and tell El Hadji to be naked before them all. And each of us will spit three times on you. You have the key to your cure. Make up your mind (p.60). Thus, the beggars who were once relegated became El Hadjis source of revitalization and Ousmanes positive alternative in revolutionary struggles. As their presence is increasingly felt, we no longer perceive the beggars in asymmetry to the opulence of wealth and power because they were able to shed their ineptitude and acquire an equality that prepares them for the impending confrontation with the police.

Conclusion From the foregoing discussion, it is unequivocal through the reading of The Last Duty, The Beggars Strike and Xala that the dis/ability of a disabled if undermined, tends to trigger perplexing manifestation. This manifestation is born out of the inordinate ambition of the bourgeois class to maintain status quo. Though it is a commonplace phenomenon that the masses are relegated in the post-independence African social stratification, there is hope for their emancipation. This is contained in thier ability as revealed in their efforts to denounce oppression as represented in the three novels. Hence, the three narratives relates equation of power between the mighty and the weak, the master and the servant, man and woman, the seemingly able and the outrightly disabled among others. Okpewhos narrative in The Last Duty is an ingenious task to portray impossibility to arrive at objectivity by everyonea universal disease that plague every human. In The Beggars Strike and Xala, the undaunted and relentless collective resistance of the beggars, is exhibited to frustrate the ambition of the powerful ones in the society.

References

Balogun, Jide. 2007. Class Stratification in Post-Independence African Novels: an example of Xala. Zaria: ABU Press Limited. Fanon, F. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Macgibban. Goffman, Erving.1963. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hal. Kehinde, Ayo (2003). Ability in disability: the empowerment of the disabled in J.M.Coetzees life and times of Michael K. University of Mumbai: Center for African Studies. Ousmane, Sembene. 1976. Xala. London: Heinemann Okpewho, Isidore. 1976. The Last Duty. Essex: Longman. Quayson, Ato, 1999 Looking Awry: Tropes of Disability in Post-colonial Writing In: An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in England Since 1970, ed. Rod Mengham. Cambridge: Polity Press Sow Fall, A.1979. The Beggars Strike. Darkar-Abidjan-Lome: NEA