|
I,
Momolu or Liberia in the Bush
A Study in Missionary Persuasion By
Rudolph Lewis
Authoritarians
(and conservatives), like colonialists, can satisfy the religious with symbolism.
The rock foundation of what it is to be, these
"superior" and rational men know they will govern in
the long run. I, Momolu, by Lorenz Graham (1902-1989),
possesses this ruling certainty of rightness. Its fresh
perspective from a tribal view generates the hope of a realistic
portrayal of African life. Our disappointment mounts, however,
as the plot slowly develops to a climax we find distasteful.
Son
of a New Orleans Methodist minister, Dr. Graham was a kindly and
good-hearted man, well meaning.
The young Lorenz, twenty-four-year-old student at UCLA
(in 1926), became fed up with all the myths about Africa
and decided to learn about Africa directly and thus he
traversed the Atlantic to become enlightened by a spiritual
journey in Liberia. There, he taught at Monrovia College, a
mission school. And naturally learned considerable from his
eager African pupils.
Sickened by malaria, Graham returned to the
United States during Harlem’s Renaissance, which embraced
Africa and rocked between romance and skepticism. Langston sang,
"I've known rivers" and Cullen mused, "What is
Africa to me?" Graham worked with W.E.B. Du Bois, and his
sister Shirley Graham became Mrs. Du Bois and in 1963 was with the
great man when he expired in Ghana. How much Du Bois influenced
Lorenz Graham is indefinite and how many Du Boisean ideas are
represented in I, Momolu is uncertain. In any event
very pot must sit on its own bottom. But Graham, I suspect,
represents and characterizes a substantial African American
perspective of that era, however shallow. I leave it to fellow
researchers to discover Du Bois' response to this work of his
brother-in-law. There may indeed be words in print that will be
revealing of the black missionary spirit.
Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton has
indicted what he calls, “the history of Afro-America’s
African dream.” He attacks and damns American Negroes'
reversal of the Middle Passage. One sympathizes with Appiah's
criticisms in In My Father’s House, and his exposure of
our cultural imperial New World attitudes. In his “A Long Way
from Home,” Appiah levels a broadside attack on Negro
intellectuals from Alexander Crummell, a black Episcopalian New
Yorker of the 19th-century, to the 1950s Richard
Wright, Mississippi Negro novelist and atheist.
I, Momolu is further grist for
Appiah’s Negro criticism.
Such Negro intellectuals, according to Appiah,
have “left contemporary African cultures with a burdensome
legacy.” These black men (and maybe their women) “inherited
a set of conceptual blinders.” From whom they “inherited”
these concepts, Appiah skirts, and asserts that the American
Negro was “unable to see virtue in Africa, despite their need
for Africa.” Their low opinion of the African results from a
low opinion of the Negro, that is, the detribalized New World
African. These men, Appiah reminds us, linked tragically “race
and Pan-Africanism,” which he views as a distorted realism.
The UCLA years probably heightened Lorenz
Graham’s racial consciousness. In close proximity to
America’s superior minds he discovers “that mainstream ideas
about Africans were stereotypical and that few books existed
describing Africans realistically.” By realism here, Graham
also means favorably from a certain racial angle of seeing. And
like the Renaissance men he admired (Douglass and Du Bois),
Graham was “curious, ingenious, skeptical, and daring.” In
his Africa missionary journey, he dared to redeem the African
character by relating his pedagogical experience in his writings
of Momolu, the son of Flumbo of Lojay, residing deep in
Liberia’s bush country.
Beneath his cautious critical language,
Appiah argues that in its origins Pan-Africanism is a kind of
New World Negro intellectual hegemony. As men of science armed
with American material progress, these Western-trained Africans
believe almost religiously they have evolved beyond the naïve
simplicity of the tribal African. This framework indeed
dominates I, Momolu, which can be described as an
overarching liberal colonial perspective that strives after a
humanistic characterization of the “pure African.” For
Graham “people are people,” however rash, uninformed, and
misguided.
I, Momolu, published in 1966, did not
suffer the history of the rise and decline of the murderous Sgt.
Doe, courted at the White House by Ronald Reagan. This
"revolutionary" maniac summarily executed by firing
squads Liberia’s leading government officials, tied to posts
on an ocean beach stripped down to their shorts. These Liberian
leaders traced their lineage back to Virginia and Maryland.
Something terrible and wonderful happened, at once, a tribal man
had risen to absolute authority, the presidency of Liberia. And
then followed the widely distributed video of Doe’s overthrow,
capture, castration, and his captors forcing him to swallow his
own member.
I,
Momolu
fails to examine mindfully its own ideology and anticipate this
potential and lurking national tragedy. In his young adult novel
Graham, however, centers the conflict of the African tribal man
at odds with the Liberian government, but to prove only
that “people are people.” As a religious missionary, Graham
sincerely recognized the humanity of the African, his indeed is
a far superior characterization than the African racial
stereotypes of his own American inheritance. But there remains a
difference. Graham views tribal life as a static and restricting
social institution, an anachronism that should be shed quickly
for African progress.
Learning his novel techniques at Columbia,
Graham does well, though I find his pacing rather boring. This
lack of excitement results because the events he presents are
more symbolical than carefully explored. Graham restricts the
tribal eyes to the African boy, Momolu, who is curious and
easily influenced by the uniforms and military discipline and
literacy of Africans who have adopted the “American way.”
The novel opens with a visit by Liberian soldiers to the
Kewpessie town of Lojay. And Flumbo, the father of Momolu, is
one of its leading men, who singularly distrusts soldiers.
Unlike other tribes (such as the 1880s Grebo),
the Kewpessie people “had always wanted to live in peace.”
Isolated “by rows of mountains, their own land was
hilly with scarcely enough level valleys for their small
farms.” Not yet caught up in the “American way” because,
for one, there were “no plantations of rubber or
coffee”; and, two, motor cars could not approach it for there
were no roads or bridges and thus “the people of Lojay knew
little about the outside world” and the “American way.” It
seem, from the author’s perspective, tribal ignorance and
backwardness generate the conflict.
As the plot develops we discover other tribes
(like the Bassa and the Kru) have already adopted or been
influenced (positively and negatively) by the “American
way,” including members of the Kewpessie tribe. Though none of
the soldiers that first entered Lojay were Kewpessie, one may
conclude that Chief Logomo, the head of Lojay’s tribal
government (with his eight-room house), was indeed influenced by
the “American way.” This appears also in Chief Logomo’s
verdict at Flumbo's public hearing.
In his talks with the captain of the soldiers
Chief Logomo was assisted by his high priest Bomo-Koko,
wearing a carved wooden mask covering his head and a robe of
black monkey fur hanging from his shoulders to the ground, and a
council of elders. From
the elevated “palaver house” Chief Logomo ceremoniously
makes his decisions and pronouncements to which Lojay’s people
give their consent.
For the sake of the novel’s missionary
frame, the seeds of tribal conflict are represented, for such
conflicts are both bound and healed by the “American way.”
As we see, because of a lack of “understanding” Flumbo and
the Kimboosie sergeant fought . . . “soon all the men of Lojay
were fighting against the soldiers. . . . Women screamed.
Someone started beating the great drum in the palaver house. It
was a call to war.”
The slave, whether in Africa or America or
Europe, learns quickly that freedom is hard defended especially
in the isolated byways of life, the weak fall victim to the
strong. The soldiers have guns, the authority of the Liberian
government, and the “American way.” Naturally and
instinctively Flumbo views the soldiers’ behavior as intrusive
and fears them as enemies of country people.
When Flumbo sees his son in the uniform of the Kimboosie
sergeant who “knew the American speech,” he rips the shirt
and pants from Momolu's body.
In this masquerade, the seeds for conflict
between father and son (Flumbo and Momolu) are also sown. The
author establishes the widening gulf with Momolu thinking
“that the soldier had meant no harm.”
Be careful of the educated fool, Daddy used to remind me,
he'll break your heart.
Because of his lack of “understanding”
and his “anger” and his tearing of government clothes Flumbo
must “pay ten
bags of rice, and Flumbo with Momolu, his son, must take the
rice to Cape Roberts on the coast and stand before the
commissioner who is the captain’s chief.”
That was “the will of the captain, and the
will of Logomo, chief of Lojay.” And then “the palaver is
finished.” Obedient to the will of their chief, Flumbo and
Momolu and two of
their fellow tribesmen load ten bags of rice, half of Flumbo’s
harvest into two canoes, five bags in each. Momolu’s marvelous
adventures thus begin and his "understanding" broadens,
though not necessarily deepens.
For his father Flumbo the delivery of rice
payment becomes an ordeal and a deeper entanglement in the
“American way.” Because of his gawking at the sights of the
Liberian world, Momolu overturns inadvertently the canoe and
five bags of rice are lost. When they appear before the
commissioner without full payment for the assault on the
government Flumbo and Momolu are arrested and tossed in a dirty
jail of “unwashed bodies and the accumulations of filth on the
floor.”
A Kewpessie brother married to a Kru woman
with a son who can read and lives in Kru Town, Jalla-Malla
rescues Flumbo and Momolu by the payment of the additional five
bags of rice. The captain of the soldiers however restricts the
movement of Flumbo and Momolu to the military barracks. There
they are the responsibility of Sergeant Poobak, a "Kewpessie
brother," who heavily influences Momolu’s rejection of
Flumbo’s truth about soldiers. He explains (removes the magic
of) guns, motor cars, and airplanes. The Liberians, whose laws
“were higher than those of the African tribes,”
“understood many things that were mysteries to the simple
people of the African countryside,” the narrator intrudes.
Called again to the countryside, the noble
captain of the soldiers requires Flumbo and Momolu to join their
expedition. Flumbo is honored with the position of headman of
the carriers and Momolu with carrying the captain’s radio.
When on the journey Flumbo nearly dies of an infected leg he is
healed by the captain’s “magic” and allowed to ride in the
captain’s hammock borne by four men. After his miraculous
recovery Flumbo says, “I would not make a fight against the
soldiers again, and now I know they are not the enemies of the
country people. These soldiers are my brothers.”
With
this transformation, the noble captain presses his victory,
“when the government comes to Lojay to make the road, will the
men of Lojay help?” Joyously, Flumbo says, “they will help,
and Flumbo, if he is in Lojay, will be their headman.” The
noble captain says, “Now Flumbo is a free Kewpessie man. The
palaver is finished.”
And
then they return to Lojay and a celebration ensues. Overcome by
his Liberian experience, Momolu confesses publicly that he now
knows “some men understand and someday I, Momolu, will
understand.” Graham’s
reforming missionary tale is thus complete. The African becoming
or desiring to be African American is reaffirming bliss.
This
reader hopes that the real-life Momolus will develop an
“understanding" with more depth and meaning than this
sentimental story with its facile psychology. Graham's I,
Momolu, though deceptive, might still be instructive as a
species of colonial missionary literature.
What
would Appiah think of this Negro American literary effort? How
"burdensome" would Appiah find this young adult novel
of divide and conquer, with its African son set against the
values of his tribal father? Should we American educators
in sympathy with African peoples ban it and toss it in the
trashcan of "Afro-America’s African dream"?
Sources: Lorenz Graham. I, Momolu. New York:
Thomas T. Crowell Company, 1966; Kwame Anthony Appiah, "A
Long Way from Home: Wright in the Gold Coast." In Richard Wright
edited and with an "Introduction" by Harold Bloom. New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1987; www.grahambooks.com.
* * *
* *
Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf
(video) * * *
* *
update 4 October 2008 |
