We are slowly losing critical culture to blind consumerism

By HENRY MUNENE

One of the greatest novels I have ever read is George Orwell’s Keep The Aspidistra Flying (1936). I know most East Africans would readily be familiar with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) or Animal Farm (1945), perhaps because the latter two have featured more prominently in our reading lists at high school and college.

Here is why I think Keep the Aspidistra Flying is ‘the bomb’, as they say in Nairobi. First, the author, whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair, manages to satirise the European (and any other) modern society’s unquestioning partiality to consumerism.

In this kind of society, anyone who does not genuflect in front of the money-god of globalisation — which was yet to take root by the time of its writing — is destroyed, confirming that Orwell was well ahead of his time.

Gordon Comstock, the protagonist, has just quit a well-paying job as a copywriter, staking his future on a collection of poetry, Mice, which he has just written, and which the author satirises as ‘a sneaky little foolscap octavo’.

While quitting his advertising job, Comstock claims to hate the aspidistra culture among middle-class European families — who have a fondness for parading the aspidistra (a kind of flower) on every windowsill — with all his heart.

So, “Gordon Comstock, the author of Mice, a sneaky little foolscap octavo, 29 years and already moth-eaten” takes up a small job as a bookshop attendant, where he strategically places a copy of Mice, so that buyers can easily see it.

But the people no longer feel anything for poetry. Hence, the man, living as he does in a hostel where he is not allowed to cook, but has to secretly brew coffee to wash down his occasional meal, becomes so poor, he has nowhere to have a good time with his girlfriend.

On several occasions, he gets a cheque from the few publications he writes short stories for, besides borrowing lots of cash from his already struggling sister.

Keep the Aspidistra Flying, it has been suggested, is the story of Eric Arthur Blair, and how he lived as a struggling writer in real life, only to make money from his writings mostly after his death in 1950.

Primitive capitalism

The story resonates with me because it captures the kind of society East Africans live in today. We live in a society where anyone who goes against the money-god of consumerism and commercialisation has to be punished and shoved to the wayside by the aspidistra culture; where the main pre-occupation is getting quick cash without cutting a sweat.

We live in a society of the type that Taban Lo Liyong, in Meditations in Limbo (1982) (later published in London as Meditations) had in mind when he wrote: “We live in an age of faith, faith with the advertising men …”

With opinion polls telling us that all the youth care for is getting rich quickly, you know we are primed for the kind of primitive capitalism of Kimeria in Ngugi’s Petals of Blood (1977), Baba Pesa in Meja Mwangi’s Striving for the Wind (1992), and Lodi Karafuu (he who even lights a cigarette with a banknote) in Mwangi Gicheru’s The Double-Cross (1983).

The most prominent characteristic of this aspidistra culture is the people’s appalling inability to question their cultural ways.

Thus, they will, in fear of being seen to be moralising, eschew any pretensions to guiding society through polemical self-criticism similar to Achebe’s The Trouble With Nigeria (2000), Ashley Montagu’s On Being Human  (1950) and other such stinging works that stood up to fads, fashions and other propagations of the ‘advertising men’.

In my thinking, it is this lack of a critical culture, especially in Nairobi, that makes us have no qualms letting children be whatever they want to be; so that they now experiment with guns, sex, drugs and other such things in their early teens.

We seem to have come to a point where reading is limited to preparation for exams — and, of course, reading books that should be titled ‘How to Steal From Society and Live Like a Playboy, all in the name of inspirational literature.

Of course, there are many great how-to books in this town, but the fact is that we have come to a point where suggesting that we read books that make us more human reminds me of ‘Gordon Comstock, author of Mice, 29 years old and already moth-eaten’, trying to dissuade people from focusing on the latest trends in dog rearing to read his ‘sneaky, little foolscap octavo’.