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FREEDOMWAYS                   THIRD QUARTER 1973

and for blocs and Third World forces everywhere. He has not only rejected the cultural values of the former white masters but also their socio-political system. He rejects the system of exploitation of man by man which merely substitutes black exploiters for white. He speaks of a "Pan-African" and "Pan-Third World" culture based on a social system which has eliminated exploitation and "the competitive accumulation of private property" - in essence, a "socialist black power" that will relate to similar nations and political structures in other parts of the world.

In these essays Ngugi comes back again and again to the role of institutions. He tells us, in many ways, tha the role of institutions in a society is to reflect the power that controls that society. Therefore it is naive for Africans to expect liberation within the framework of the European institutions that were developed to justify slavery and the colonial system that followed. It is more naive to expect these institutions to reform themselves when reform is tantamount to presiding over their own demise. Ngugi calls attention to the need to look at African societies before the coming of the Europeans and the impact of the Europeans on these societies. These were basically communal societies, pluralistc in structure, where nobody was very rich and nobody was poor at all. All property belonged to the total community. These societies existed not only before Karl Marx was born, but before Europe itself was born.

Colonialism and its twin, capitalism, introduced the "sacredness" of private property into the African way of life. Ngugi seems to be asking: "What is so sacred about private property? What is so sacred about one man taking for himself more than he can use in a lifetime while people walk by his mansion of wealth starving?"

In an article on Ngugi in the New Statesman, London, October 20, 1972, the writer Angus Calder writes about the private agony that might have led Ngugi to his present position. He said: "Firstly, when he [Ngugi] says that 'the writer . . . lives in, and is shaped by, history,' he offers not dogma, but his own experience." He continues: "He is, secondly, a subtle and resolute Marxist humanist. He builds on the achievements of older men - Fanon, Richard Wright, Nyerere and many more - who suffered in the vanguard of black literature and politics. Others beside blacks, of course, have been scorned and oppressed; but only black intellectuals, of course, have been both excluded on racial grounds and also, with an evil irony, marooned away from their people by their education, by their uniquely complete steeping in the vaues of the exploiter's culture.

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