Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited by Minna Johanna Niemi (review)

Reviewed by: Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited by Minna Johanna Niemi Charles Kipn'eno Rono Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited BY MINNA JOHANNA NIEMI Routledge, 2021. viii + 204 pp. ISBN 9780367766658 paper. When a newly released seminal book hits the market with a banner that it examines contemporary writing, readers look forward to confronting analyses of texts published in the last three decades. It is, however, not the case with Minna Johanna Niemi, whose title Complicity and Responsibility in Contemporary African Writing: The Postcolony Revisited promises to marshal recently generated ideas within the field of complicity studies to read contemporary African fiction but she goes back to classics by Ayi Kwei Armah, J. M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, and Nuruddin Farah and supplements them with relatively recent work by South African author Michiel Heyns. As one of the several volumes in Routledge's African Governance series published in 2021, Niemi addresses the complex relationship between complicity and responsibility in African fiction, claiming that characters either resist or fall prey to indoctrination with culprits dropping toward complicity as an effective rhetorical tool for material and psychological survival. Though Niemi situates her discussion on foundational texts that have been studied over and over, the book is indispensable because of the profundity with which it brings to the fore the sidelined "question of the individual to literary studies" (6), mainly as a moral agent in totalitarian contexts where political establishments structurally implicate citizens in wrongdoing. Preceded by an introduction that establishes the tone of complicity and responsibility (2–6), the eight chapters of the tantalizing book assess the postcolony's systematic and collective violation of human rights as they attend to the ways in which individual fictional characters struggle to rethink responsibility amid their inevitable complicity in oppressive regimes. Though chapters aren't partitioned into sections, readers are alerted to the fact that they spiral into one another, sometimes expecting readers to undertake twin-reading to advance one or another particular idea. A remarkable example is chapters five through seven, which address ideological indoctrination as an inexorable framework of complicity in Dangarembga's trilogy, Heyns's The Children's Day, and Farah's Maps. Interestingly, chapter five situates the politics of ideological indoctrination within Tambudzai's character throughout Dangarembga's three novels, and chapters six [End Page 185] and seven advance the concept through childhood complicity with the former chapter challenging it and the later one discussing young minds' painful submission to the ideals of this ideological indoctrination. Focusing on the unnamed main character in Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and the figure of the magistrate in Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, chapters one and two explore characters' successful negotiation out of complicity paths in increasingly totalitarian contexts. Using Arendtian philosophy on individual responsibility, these chapters critique the essence of one's own moral thoughts by demonstrating the push-and-pull between characters' submission to the dictates of totalitarian regimes, their misgivings, and their final decision to uphold their own ethical behavior. Cautious not to abet the same complicity she criticizes, Niemi pits Arendt's individualism against existentialism, offering to invest on the former as an analytical tool for evaluating scenarios of a "good man" who must balance the two priorities of "remaining true to himself and maintaining or creating a public realm around him[self]" (51) by opting "to suffer wrong than to do wrong" (40). The following chapters, three and four, turn to African elites and the complicity that lies beneath their supposed intellectual commitment to responsibility. After making an agreeable observation in the third chapter that complicity can thrive in intellectuals' silences, Niemi in chapter four makes the seemingly unthinkable but well-articulated assertion that committed literature can be thoroughly complicit to the oppressive apartheid regime it writes against. While chapter three brilliantly demonstrates the writers' inalienability "from structures [they] want to criticize" (72) because the same regime they oppose "inadvertently reproduces its ideology through negation" (75), chapter six, whose arguments can be paired with the third chapter, debunks the notion of childhood naivety to show how their ethically wrong ways as in Heyns's The...