military and the (re)making of African postcolonial identity in Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy and Manuel Rui's Yes, Comrade!, The

INTRODUCTION

Ken SaroWiwa's novel Sozaboy, set during the Nigerian Biafran War (19671970), and Manuel Rui's collection of short stories Yes, Comrade!, set during the months leading up to Angolan independence in 1975 and ending five days after independence, are fictional texts concerned with political issues surrounding civilmilitary relations, civil war, and independence. Taken together, these texts from two different African nations mirror a common and perhaps necessary process in decolonization, a shift from an initial buoyancy at independence when nationbuilding is the primary concern to a later critical evaluation of post-independence governments with an eye to potential restructuring and reform. Rui and SaroWiwa write at different points on the time line of the decolonization process--Rui at the time of Angolan independence and SaroWiwa some twentyfive years after Nigerian independence, though he sets his novel nearly two decades earlier. Beyond any shared aesthetic purpose, the two writers have nearly opposite political purposes which determine how each author constructs the military and its relationship with the civilian world within the text. Both authors create a portrait of national identity by focusing on civil-military relations during a period of civil war, but Rui's political purpose is to create a sense of national unity by celebrating the MPLA (the governing party at the time of the book's first Angolan distribution in 1977) at the beginning of independence while SaroWiwa's is to criticize the military government(s) which had failed to achieve the postcolonial Nigeria of freedom and general prosperity which Nigerians had desired.

Several factors point to the need for a reading of these works within their cultural frameworks at this time. Both SaroWiwa and Rui were deeply involved in their nations' politics, and this involvement extends into their fiction. Both texts, originally published outside the United States, were first distributed in the U.S. in the 1990's--Rui's in 1993 and SaroWiwa's in 1994--where the audience may not be familiar with the historical and political contexts central to an understanding of these texts. SaroWiwa's American audience has also further increased recently, following international coverage of his execution in 1995 and the ensuing outrage against the Nigerian government.

YES,COMRADE!

Writing just after independence, Rui's purpose is to create unity of a fractured people. At Angola's independence in 1975, two different countries and governments were proclaimed; at midnight on November 10, the MPLA claimed Angolan independence, and Neto was named the president of the People's Republic of Angola;1 on November 11, the FNLA and UNITA2 also proclaimed independence and named the new country the Democratic People's Republic of Angola.3 Rui was deeply immersed in the politics of the newly independent nation. In 1977, the publication year of Yes, Comrade!,4 Rui himself served as director of the MPLA government's Department of Revolutionary Orientation.5

Rui creates a picture of national unity by deflating the civil aspect of the Angolan conflict and instead portraying the conflict as one brought into Angola from the outside, consistently constructing soldiers of parties other than the MPLA as outsiders. Rui links another Angolan party, the FNLA, to the Portuguese in order to assert that the FNLA is composed of outsiders. Rui refers to them as "the puppet forces" who want to set up a "headquarters for terrorism"6 in Angola. In one stream of consciousness segment, Rui points to collusion between the Portuguese, the former colonizers of Angola, and the FNLA: "the tuga [Portuguese] forces favoring the FNLA, we have heard how the puppets bring arms in across the Zaire border to kill our people the Portuguese forces look the other way."7 Rui also portrays the FNLA and UNITA as "lackeys: Roberto, Savimbi, or Chipenda, imperialist pawns,"8 suggesting the conflict in Angola is between the MPLA and the outsiders--the imperialists and their puppets--rather than between different Angolan groups.

Rui's strategy of portraying the other parties as outsiders also involves making much of the FNLA's international, especially Zairean, connections while erasing the MPLA's own international connections. Rui makes brief mention of a group of MPLA soldiers' having "had to go into Zaire [t]o pick up weapons that other comrades had gathered together there,"9 but he emphasizes that this is hostile territory for the MPLA and the Angolan people. The northern "side of the border [is] precisely where the tyrants were now coming from to terrorize the Angolan people,"10 and an MPLA Commander speaks of the UPA11 attacks which occur on the MPLA soldiers who are forced to enter Zaire,12 thus rooting the FNLA to foreign land. Roberto, the FNLA leader, an Angolan by birth who had spent much of his young life in Zaire, is described as "that sissy from Zaire," 13 another part of Rui's partycolored presentation of the conflict as coming from outside rather than being internal as well.