The Stranger Kings Theory by Marshall Sahlins and Edward Said’s Orientalist Panorama

 

Postcolonial studies refer to an academic discipline characterizing various approaches to intellectual disquisitions that analyze and respond to the socio-cultural bequests of colonialism and imperialism, to the ramifications of regulating a country and settling down on its soil and the venalities committed against the native dwellers and their land.

Litterateurs of the postcolonial era have sketched the struggles and tribulations of colonized masses through their verses, essays and fictional works.  The most eminent postcolonial authors and poets are Derek Walcott, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy, Zia Haider Rahman, Khushwant Singh, Amitav Ghosh, Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Wole Soyinka, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Paul Wellman, John Masters, Michael Chrichton, Gayatri Spivak and so on. John Masters illustrated the clashes, rebellions and bloodbath that rocked the Indian subcontinent during the colonial times in his novels Night-runners of Bengal and Bhowani Junction. Khushwant Singh movingly portrayed the partition of 1947 followed by communal mayhem in his novels I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Train to Pakistan. Michael Chrichton told the nerve-raking stories of the white Europeans’ assaults on the African wildlife and mineral resources in his novel Congo. Leopold Sedar Senghor wrote poems about the revolts for independence initiated by the Senegalese people against the French colonial forces. Gabriel Garcia Marquez peerlessly fictionalized the rise of civilization, political upheavals and civil wars in South America and Caribbean Islands in his everlasting masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. Derek Walcott’s poems recall the colonial days with a mellifluent mélange of diaspora and classicism keeping in view his poems “A Far Cry from Africa”, “Blues” and “Omeros”. Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s book Decolonizing the Mind takes a deep look into the postcolonial mindsets of people and nations who were once colonized by western powers. The era of colonialism is underlined in history as a period of repression, plundering and imperialism spearheaded by several European countries. During the colonial centuries, different parts of the world were occupied by the colonial forces of England, France, Spain, Portugal and Holland. South America, also known as Latin America, languished under the colonial governance of the Spaniards and the clashes between the Spanish troops and the local tribal clans have been illustrated by different authors of previous and current ages. In course of time as the South American nations became independent, they had to retain Spanish as their state language because the native South Americans did not have any common language of their own. So, Spanish language replaced the dialects of the South American communities even after the Spanish colonial authorities had to pack up and leave. However, a colonial hangover clung to the creeds and practices of the South American nations as they could not topple the supremacy of Spanish language with their own dialects. Similarly, the former British Empire had ruled North America, Asia, Africa and the Oceania for hundreds of years. With the passage of time, most of the occupied territories became independent through wars and revolutions in Africa, Asia and North America. But unfortunately a good number of African and Asian countries could not expedite their economic progress following the end of colonial period which is why they have remained dependent on the western states for financial, infrastructural and technological aid. Being a Kenyan by birth, Ngugi Wa Thiongo observes these limitations of his motherland which prevail across some other least developed countries too.

Economic emancipation is still a wild goose chase for many poverty-stricken countries. For this reason, these countries cannot win their battles on the lingual grounds either. English is the most widely used language in a great deal of countries in Asia, Africa and North America and the necessity of English language in all walks of life goes without saying in these countries. But some native languages and dialects of these countries are being jeopardized by the extensive application of English in all outdoor and most of the indoor chores of these nations. Loss of lingual individualism may threaten the cultural selfhood of a nation, according to Ngugi Wa Thiongo. Some African dialects such as Swahili, Gikuyu and Zulu as well as the speakers of these dialects are now on the verge of losing their ethnic identity due to the onslaught of English language across different African nations.  Ngugi Wa Thiongo is one of those handful of authors who can or could write in more than one language such as Milan Kundera, Vladimir Nabokov and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The foreign languages that most of the African authors write in are the languages of the imperialists -- English, French and Portuguese – Ngugi Wa Thiongo asserts in Decolonizing the Mind. For this reason, Ngugi Wa Thiongo has been writing in a few regional dialects of Kenya for last several years in order to promote a language-oriented individualistic image of the general Kenyans so that they become inspired to attach more preference to their own languages rather than the borrowed ones. It reminds us of what Nelson Mandela once said about language, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head; if you talk to him in his language that goes to his heart.” On the other hand, language is a universal mode of communication. It serves the interactive purposes of all people irrespective of nations and tribes.

While writing about cultural expansion of the west across the rest part of the world, which is one of the most fatal weapons of neoimperialism, another well-known writer and orientalist Edward Said (1935 to 2003) looked back on the driving forces that instigated the colonized people to revolt against their colonial rulers. He wrote in his book Culture and Imperialism that, "Most important, the grand narratives of emancipation and enlightenment mobilized people in the colonial world to rise up and throw off imperial subjection". So, the watchwords of independence and egalitarianism propagated by the western philosophers, poets and ideologues during 18th and 19th centuries bounced back on to the western colonists, as their ideals ignited a spirit of freedom among the masses they had ruled for centuries. In the same way, the gimmicks exercised by the western big guns in the present world by means of their strategies and rhetoric have all chances like the past to be slapped back on to their own faces if history repeats itself, according to the historic evidence found in Edward Said’s book.

The title Decolonizing the Mind deserves a close interpretation. People in different regions of the world have been able to liberate themselves from the colonial powers through armed combats and face-offs. But the phantom of colonial past still haunts the minds of millions of people. People of the previously colonized countries physically defeated the colonial authorities on the battlefields but they are still to secure independence from the far-reaching influence of colonialism on their psychology, on their cerebral turfs. A colonial silhouette still governs our thoughts and views. We are still highly fond of referring to the former colonial states as the finest examples in terms of enlightenment and progress even though our own cultural heritage is amazingly rich and magnificent and has a long and glorious history. Ngugi Wa Thiongo urges the developing nations to rise above the virtual shadow of colonialism that has been narrowing our vision till today. To paraphrase some of his words, psychological decolonization does not exactly endorse the idea of rejecting the knowledge we gather from the western world. Rather most of our concentration should be dedicated to the task of preserving the fast evaporating heritage of our own lingual and cultural treasures as cultural dominance is another feature of the current visage of western expansionism. Ngugi Wa Thiongo wrote in this book, “In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe stole art treasures from Africa to decorate their houses and museums; in the twentieth century Europe is stealing the treasures of the mind to enrich their languages and cultures." Through these lines Ngugi Wa Thiongo virtually makes a clarion call to the dwellers of the Asian, African and South American nations to wake up and to resist the ongoing assaults on their intellectual reservoirs.

Last but not least, the variety of languages people speak across the world should not be a barrier for the exchange of thoughts, ideas and views among global masses. A saying by the Persian mystic scholar Jalaluddin Rumi may be quoted in this context, “Words are a pretext. It is the inner bond that draws one person to another, not words.”

Another latest conceptual entry in the arena of postcolonial thinking is the “Stranger King Theory.” This theory was developed by Professor Marshall David Sahlins (1930 to 2021), an anthropologist who worked for University of Chicago, United States of America. The Stranger King Theory propounds an innovative superstructure to comprehend global colonialism, which is rather different from most of the conventional notions about the colonial era. It aims to point out the apparent indolence with which many indigenous tribes endorsed colonial authoritarianism at the very beginning without vehement expostulations. In other words, the Stranger King Theory unveils the way the colonial pranksters from the west took advantage of the credulity of the native people whom they fooled and exploited with humbugs and mendacity. In some parts of the world, tribal clans had factional rifts with each other which aided the external powers to colonize their territories and to govern them capitalizing on their deconsolidated posture.

 
Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
is a contributor to different
English newspapers and
magazines.