December 16, 2016 - 06:37
“He told her, ‘Of course you will deliver abroad,’ and asked which she preferred, America or England... Aunty Uju chose America, because her baby could still have automatic citizenship there.” (Adichie 102)
Thus, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie demonstrates in her novel Americanah, some Nigerians turn to the West to enhance their opportunities, even from their birth. Aunty Uju’s wealthy boyfriend, the General, never considers letting his son be born in Nigeria, and Aunty Uju agrees: He must be born in the United States so he will be an American citizen, which will enable him to travel to or move to America should the need ever arise, as it does a week after his first birthday, when his father dies and his mother must flee Nigeria to avoid the General’s family (Adichie 104, 106). But Western countries are not just a refuge for the mistresses of deceased military officials. Ifemelu, Aunty Uju’s younger cousin and the protagonist of Americanah, has many classmates, including her boyfriend Obinze, who dream of living in America or Britain (Adichie 78-79). When Ifemelu herself moves to America to attend college, she is one among a wave of Nigerian college students who are emigrating to complete their degrees without the constant interruption of strikes that Nigerian universities are facing (Adichie 120-121). Britain, the colonial power that had relinquished control of Nigeria a few decades earlier, and America, the Western superpower with political, economic, and cultural influence worldwide, are both regarded as a promised land, the solution to all the problems that afflict Ifemelu and her peers in their developing homeland.
Salie, the Senegalese narrator of Fatou Diome’s novel Le Ventre de l’Atlantique notices a similar mindset among her brother and his peers. She remarks, “Après la colonisation historiquement reconnue, règne maintenant une sorte de colonisation mentale : les jeunes joueurs vénéraient et vénèrent encore la France. À leurs yeux, tout ce qui est enviable vient de France” (Diome 52-53). Translated, this reads, “After the historically recognized colonization, a sort of mental colonization now reigns: the young soccer players venerated and still venerate France. In their eyes, all that is desirable comes from France.” Like Ifemelu’s friends, these boys feel limited by the opportunities available to them in their own country, and they look to another country, a colonizing country, as the place where they can follow their dreams and achieve success. This mental colonization, as Salie calls it, drives the impulse in all of these characters to emigrate, but some have linked it to other problems in formerly colonized nations.
Ilya Adler, describing the phenomenon in Mexico, defines mental colonization as, “a self-destructing mechanism by which an ideology that is used to oppress or weaken an ethnic or national group is internalized by the victims of that ideology, and accepted as valid.” He illustrates this with the example of Mexican businesses, whose leaders often assume that management courses taught in the United States are better than those in Mexico. People who take the courses, however, often find that what they learn in the United States is not useful for their work in Mexico, whereas the education and experience that business executives gain in Mexico enables them to perform as well as or better than their colleagues when they work in the United States (Adler 18). Thus, mental colonization is not only detrimental to a country’s self-confidence, but also counterproductive in that it overvalues Western practices that are not the only or necessarily the best methods possible.
Analyzing mental colonization and approaches to decolonization in African countries, Messay Kebede writes:
Doubtless, Africans strongly reject the characterization of their legacy as primitive. All the same, both the process of Western education and the normative equation of modernization with Westernization condition them to endorse the charge of backwardness... modem schooling is for Africans nothing else than the learning of self-contempt through the systematic exposure to Africa's utter insignificance. Africans cannot but internalize this view, given that their ability to echo the Western idea of Africa is how they acquire modern education. (109)
According to Kebede, this internalized belief in Western stereotypes of African people as “primitive” and “irrational” plays a large role in hindering African development (110). This idea magnifies the impact of mental colonization on the characters in Americanah: It has taught them to seek an end to their problems in Western countries, and it shared in the creation of those problems. A solution, then, for both the characters and for African nations, can never be achieved without the decolonization of the mind. Ifemelu and Obinze’s journeys over the course of the novel lead them through this process.
Although Ifemelu leaves Nigeria first and stays away the longest, even becoming an American citizen, Obinze is far more interested in the West, especially America, than she is when they first meet. Obinze had hoped that his mother’s sabbatical would take them to America, and he even wishes he had been born there (Adichie 71, 79). He studies American history and culture. “Manhattan was his zenith” (Adichie 80). Both Ifemelu and Obinze mostly read books by British or American authors, but Ifemelu seems to read these because they happen to be the books she has found that she likes. Obinze, on the other hand intentionally seeks them out: He tells Ifemelu, “I love the American [classics],” and his mother, “I read American books because America is the future” (Adichie 72, 84). He certainly hopes that it will be his future, as he mentions twice while in college. The first time is hypothetical; he is imagining his ideal life, which includes marrying Ifemelu and moving to America (Adichie 114). The second time, he is stating his intention to attend graduate school in America as he encourages Ifemelu to go to America to earn her undergraduate degree, saying that he will join her (Adichie 121). Obinze is obsessed with the United States, and firmly convinced that he belongs there: “he had never simply wanted to go abroad, as many others did... It had always been America, only America” (Adichie 288). Nevertheless, both he and Ifemelu ultimately feel that they cannot find success in Nigeria, which leads her to America and him to Britain; it is at this point that they most fully succumb to mental colonization.
Immigration, however, is a turning point in this process. Ifemelu finds herself both embracing and rejecting American culture. At first, she is stunned and even disgusted by the way Americans speak, with their inattention to grammar and their obsession with the word “excited” (Adichie 165). She finds her classes easy, but dislikes the concept of a participation grade, believing that it encourages students to talk even when they have nothing important to say (Adichie 164). Now that she can compare Nigeria to America, she considers many aspects of Nigerian culture to be superior; this is the start of her decolonization. But she also wants to belong to American culture: “She hungered to understand everything about America, to wear a new, knowing skin right away” (Adichie 166). She begins to read the American books that Obinze recommends to her, and she discovers a much deeper love of reading than she had known before (Adichie 166-167). She uses American words and expressions, and she adopts some American cultural practices: “New words were falling out of her mouth. Columns of mist were dispersing... She spoke up in class... thrilled that she could disagree with professors” (Adichie 167). When she realizes that some people doubt her ability to speak English due to her Nigerian accent, she intentionally cultivates an American one (Adichie 164). Thus, even as her mind is beginning to be decolonized in some respects, she is still internalizing mental colonization. Until, after three years in America, she thanks a telemarketer who tells her she sounds American (Adichie 215). She knows then that she has reached her goal, that her voice can maintain Americans’ respect, but she decides at that moment to return to her natural accent, for “[her] fleeting victory had left in its wake a vast, echoing space, because she had taken on, for too long, a pitch of voice and a way of being that was not hers” (Adichie 216). That is when she really begins to decolonize herself, when she consciously embraces her Nigerian identity within her American life.
Obinze moves to London “to escape from the oppressive lethargy of choicelessness” (Adichie 341). He hopes that this will be an intermediate step between Nigeria and America, but instead he stays in Britain after his visa has expired and works menial jobs using a false identity (Adichie 285, 290, 310-311). He neither rejects nor embraces Britain, and when it rejects him, he is depressed, but not decolonized. This process starts for him after he returns home and begins to find wealth in Nigeria. His success is in direct opposition to the colonizing narrative, but it is not an act of decolonization because it is largely dependent on Western companies such as Shell (Adichie 27). He is also working with Nigerians who are just as smitten with the West as he and his friends were in school. Nevertheless, Obinze is decolonizing his mind; as he tells Ifemelu, “I realized I could buy America, and it lost its shine” (Adichie 535). His decolonization is also evident when some guests at a party he is attending advise his wife on where she and Obinze should send their daughter to school. One recommends “the French school” so she can “learn another civilized language”; the other recommends Sidcot Hall, where “[they] teach the complete British curriculum” (Adichie 35). Their belief that the best education comes from Western schools is a clear example of mental colonization, but Obinze demonstrates that his mind has been to some extent decolonized when he replies, “Didn’t we all go to primary schools that taught the Nigerian curriculum?” (Adichie 35). He does not necessarily want to send his daughter to a Nigerian school, but he is rejecting the notion that a school must be better because it is based on a European education.
Obinze’s defense of “the Nigerian curriculum” is especially significant since, according to Kebede, it is “the first task of a serious attempt to decolonize the African mind, namely, the radical transformation of what African students learn at schools and universities. The elimination of Eurocentric concepts from the curriculum and their replacement by conceptions whose basic purpose is to centre Africa takes priority over all other decolonizing measures” (Kebede 127). It is in schools that African children have learned to consider Western culture superior to that of Africa, and it is in the schools that this must be corrected. However, another important step in decolonization is reframing the narrative of African development, so that it is not considered to be backward, but rather following a path chosen by African people, which differed from that chosen by European people (Kebede 126-127). Similarly, Ifemelu’s decision to return to Nigeria after becoming an American citizen and Obinze’s decision to remain in Nigeria once he was wealthy enough to leave might be considered backward; just like their friends and Aunty Uju, everyone wants to go to a Western country. But in making the choice to build a life in Nigeria despite all its “problems,” Ifemelu and Obinze recognize the value of their homeland outside of Western norms, and this is the greatest step they take in their mental decolonization.
Works Cited
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Anchor, 2013. Print.
Adler Milstem, Ilya. “Mental Colonization.” Business Mexico 12.3 (2002): 18. ProQuest. Web. 15 Dec. 2016.
Diome, Fatou. Le Ventre de l’Atlantique. Paris: Editions Anne Carrière, 2003. Print.
Kebede, Messay. “African Development and the Primacy of Mental Decolonization.” Africa Development/Afrique et Développement 29.1 (2004): 107-29. JSTOR. Web. 15 Dec. 2016.