Ashoka Mody, India is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2023. 528 pages. Deepti Kapoor, Age of Vice. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023. 548 pages. Ram Gopal Varma (director), Sarkar 3 (film).

Ashoka Mody is an economist, currently a faculty member at Princeton University. He has written a history of India’s politics and economic development over 75 years, from independence in 1947 to the management of COVID in 2020–22. Given his career – he spent over a decade at the World Bank, followed by nearly two decades as a senior official at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the reader might expect his book to employ the cautious style of international agencies such as the IMF. Admittedly, Mody discusses exchange rate policies, tax policies, income distribution, poverty rates and such. Neither the Bank nor the IMF would ever publish this book. Mody’s goal is to damn the priorities of Indian politicians, from Jawaharlal Nehru to Narendra Modi. Numerous academic colleagues (Indian, American and British) have reviewed the manuscript and provided implicit support for Mody’s prosecution.

Some academics, graduate students and motivated general readers will read Mody’s book. Its audience will probably be small. Those not willing to read a lengthy academic book can get a feel of Indian politics via “realist” authors and movie directors – such as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, the film Slumdog Millionaire (based on Vikas Swarup’s Q & A) and Ram Gopal Varma’s “Godfather” Sarkar films. Deepti Kapoor’s Age of Vice is a new novel with themes that overlap with Mody’s: unacceptably large income inequality; unacceptable corruption in government and business, much of it in construction and real estate; elite capture of state-level governments; and blurring of the distinction between corrupt politicians and corrupt businessmen. Her novel may not be as complex as Salman Rushdie’s, but it is a good read.

Mody’s two accusations

Mody’s first accusation is that, from the beginning, Nehru and most – albeit not all – Congress leaders failed to prioritize provision of universal quality services such as primary health care and, above all, basic education. Nehru was enamoured of large-scale infrastructure and industrial projects such as steel mills. He described himself as a socialist, but he avoided the complex administrative details required to establish school systems able to provide universal literacy and numeracy.

The second is that, after Nehru, no prime minister has given priority to containing corruption. Indira Gandhi abandoned her father’s discomfort with corruption. She described it as a “global phenomenon,” making no distinction between Scandinavia and India. Over the following decades, Mody argues, corruption expanded and has become deeply embedded in the conventions of India’s public services. The potential for democratic accountability to rectify matters has more or less disappeared.

By prioritizing Hindu nationalism (Hindutva) and dismissing Mahatma Gandhi’s insistence on religious tolerance, Narendra Modi has eliminated the possibility of a major political party campaigning successfully on a platform reversing the political rot dating back to Indira Gandhi. Among many items of evidence, Mody notes the rise in the share of members of parliament (Lok Sabha) with pending criminal cases: from 24 per cent in 2004 (Congress government led by Manmohan Singh) to more than 40 per cent in 2019 (BJP government led by Modi).

Mody’s conclusion, echoing Kapoor: India is broken.

Basic education failure in South Asia and the Sri Lanka exception

Mody devotes a chapter to Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore is known as a poet and novelist, but he was also a passionate advocate of universal public education: “In my view the imposing tower of misery which today rests on the heart of India has its sole foundation in the absence of education. Caste divisions, religious conflicts, aversion to work, precarious economic conditions – all centre on this single factor.”¹ Tagore travelled widely; he examined public school systems in many countries. As mentor to Nehru, he (unsuccessfully) recommended that an independent India pursue the education strategies of countries such as the Soviet Union, Japan and Sri Lanka.

Akin to Canada in the mid-19th century, by the 1930s governments in the provinces of the British raj controlled domestic policy. Unlike the rest of the subcontinent, the leading politicians in Colombo prioritized universal basic education in the decades prior to Sri Lanka’s gaining sovereignty in 1948. The education minister, C.W.W. Kannangara, played a powerful role in cabinet debates over priorities. He and Tagore offered mutual support on the importance of education. By the time Kannangara retired from politics in 1947, Sri Lanka had an adult literacy rate of about 65 per cent, four times the rate elsewhere in the subcontinent. Tagore died in 1941. Had he lived past 1947, he would have been deeply disappointed.

Mody thanks his 96-year-old father for providing help on the early chapters dealing with the politics of Nehru’s reign. Presumably, this passage reflects both his and his father’s conclusion:

The government persisted in dedicating insufficient funds to primary education and spending those scarce education funds on higher education. Thus, India acquired a lopsided education system that did not serve the people and created the incentives among students for acquiring degree certificates rather than acquiring education. Corruption infiltrated the administration, especially, of colleges and universities.

Convincing evidence exists to confirm the conclusion of Mody and his father that, since 1947, India has continued to suffer a “lopsided education system.” Tagore’s “imposing tower” of illiteracy has shrunk over the last 75 years, but the majority of Indian children remain illiterate. The first five-year plan (1951–56) promised that all children aged 6–11 would achieve, within a decade, at least universal primary education and hence basic literacy and numeracy. Six decades later, in 2009, the Congress government enacted the Right to Education Act, which specified universal education to age 14. At the central and state levels, governments spent money on better school facilities but made no progress on reducing corruption in hiring and posting of teachers, decentralizing administration and increasing teacher supervision. Overall, student outcomes have not improved.

The only credible assessment of primary education outcomes across rural India is very large in-home surveys organized every two years by Pratham, a large NGO. The two key results of these surveys are the ability of Grade 5 students (the final primary grade in South Asia) to read a short story at a Grade 2 level and successfully divide a three-digit by a one-digit number. In the 2018 survey, the most recent pre-COVID, on average 50 per cent of more than 500,000 children surveyed could read the story; 28 per cent could do the division. Admittedly, the variance across Indian states is large.²

A new piece of evidence is the World Bank’s learning poverty statistic, a heroic attempt to compare basic literacy rates across countries in the cohort of children expected to be in upper-level primary grades. In India, the 2022 learning poverty rate (proportion of children between the ages of 10 and 14 who can’t read a Grade 2 story) is 56 per cent. That is, only 44 per cent of children in that age range can read at a Grade 2 level. The comparable rate in Bangladesh is 42 per cent able to read, in Pakistan 25 per cent. By contrast, 85 per cent of Sri Lankan children can read, at least at the Grade 2 level.

Failure to control corruption

The World Bank defines corruption as “the extent to which public power is exercised for private gain, including both petty and grand forms of corruption, as well as ‘capture of the state’ by elites and private interests.”³ Those engaged in corruption have an incentive not to divulge their illegal activity. Hence, measuring corruption is open to much debate. One respected measure of corruption at the national level is Transparency International’s annual Corruption Perception Index. In 2022, of 147 countries ranked top to bottom, India ranked 85th. Incidentally, the corruption in other South Asian countries is worse. Bangladesh ranked 147th, Pakistan ranked 140th, Nepal ranked 104th and Sri Lanka ranked 101st.⁴

Here is Mody’s abstract to Chapter 22 (“Modi Breaks India’s Fractured Democracy”):

A democracy works for the people when it provides public goods that help everyone enhance their own well-being. By that test, Indian democracy definitively betrayed its people. When Narendra Modi became prime minister , Indians suffered from poor quality education and health services, cities were chaotic, the judicial system worked only for some, and rampant environmental pollution was depleting the inheritance of India’s children. The centrality of construction as a growth driver was contributing to corruption and the injection of criminals in politics; this was true for even progressive states such as Tamil Nadu. With Modi’s ascent, an intolerant Hindutva became an added impediment to democracy. Modi’s initiatives to provide more toilets and gas stoves helped but made no dent in the broader lack of public goods. The 2019 election brought election spending, legislators facing criminal charges, and Hindutva to a new crescendo, sending Indian democracy into possibly irreversible decline.

Mody provides a critique of Indian business elites, politicians (in all major parties) and the judiciary. At time of writing (February 2023), it appears that Gautam Adani, head of a conglomerate with headquarters in Gujarat (Modi’s home state), has manipulated financial accounts. The result is a halving of Adani’s known corporate share values, previously $200 billion USD. The Economist’s summary of recent events is consistent with Mody’s:

The Modi years have in many ways eroded India’s checks and balances. His government has steadily undermined the independence of the courts and the police. The media are mostly too cowed to investigate the mighty as they once did. Few Indian newspapers would have touched a story about Mr Adani had an American firm not asked the tough questions first. Mr Adani himself recently bought NDTV, a news channel that was once critical of the government but is now supine.⁵

South Asia’s “realists”

Kapoor’s novel is partially an autobiography. Neda, a central character in the novel, is an investigative journalist for a Delhi newspaper. Kapoor was a journalist while in her 20s. She admits to participating in the dissolute lifestyle of Delhi’s young and rich. The second central character, Sunny Wadia, is the dilettante son of the powerful though thoroughly corrupt and brutal patriarch of the Wadia construction firm. The third is Ajay, son of an impoverished single mother whose husband has been killed by a neighbouring farmer. Ajay’s mother sells him to a trafficker of child servants and prostitutes. Ajay ultimately becomes Sunny’s personal assistant.

At times in the novel, Kapoor assumes the role of journalist and describes the tactics whereby the Wadia firm displaces slum dwellers in Delhi and buys up land titles of farmers with small holdings in the city’s outskirts. There is a corrupt beneficial link between the Wadia corporation and the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh. I don’t want to spoil the climax. Reviewers in the New York Times and the Guardian refer to Mario Puzo’s Godfather as a precedent.⁶ Both novels are based on the complex codependence of organized criminals and senior politicians. There are other literary precedents to note.

Kapoor has obviously been inspired, in terms of plot, by Adiga’s White Tiger, a brilliant satire and winner of the 2008 Booker prize. Adiga’s equivalent of Ajay is Balram, a very smart, very ruthless peasant from Bihar. He rises in status to become the driver for Mr. Ashok, owner of a coal mine. To get the permit for a new mine, Mr. Ashok must pay a very large bribe to the relevant cabinet minister in Delhi. As he drives his employer to the minister’s apartment, he slits Mr. Ashok’s throat and disappears with the duffel bag stuffed with cash. This provides Balram with the necessary financing to become a successful entrepreneur in Bangalore. The novel is written as a series of letters to the prime minister of China who is about to visit Bangalore and witness India’s high-tech developments there. Balram wants the Chinese guest to learn about the actual manner of conducting business in India, not the Potemkin village version prepared by political elites.

Much as Balzac, Dickens, Dostoyevsky and Gogol described the indefensible extremes of wealth, poverty and corruption in 19th-century Europe, Kapoor and Adiga are two of many realist novelists who describe the contemporary shape of Indian society. To these two can be added their Pakistani equivalents, Mohsin Hamid and Mohammed Hanif.

A link from Dickens to contemporary South Asian writers is Slumdog Millionaire, a film loosely based on Vikas Swarup’s novel Q & A that won the 2009 Oscar as best film of the year. The actors were all Indian; the director, Danny Boyle, was British. The equivalent of Fagin in Oliver Twist could be the thugs who recruit street children on a Mumbai garbage dump, blind them and set them up as productive beggars. The Mumbai Oliver and a young girl escape the clutches of Mumbai’s Fagins. He becomes a chawallah (tea seller), working for a television company that runs a popular quiz show; she becomes a prostitute. By good luck, Oliver finds a benefactor; by good luck, the chawallah becomes a quiz contestant and wins a million rupees. He elopes with the girl, who is liberated from a brothel. The ending is a Bollywood song and dance.

Ram Gopal Varma has, in the manner of Francis Ford Coppola, directed several “Godfather” Bollywood movies. He freely acknowledges his inspiration from Coppola and Puzo.⁷ His most recent Sarkar was released in 2017. Varma is here testing the limit of free expression in Modi’s India. Sarkar is a Mumbai don, the equivalent of Brando’s aging mafia don. The film introduces corrupt businessmen, corrupt politicians and corrupt police, as well as the role of vigilante justice. In Godfather II, the opening scene is an old man appealing to the don to revenge the rape of his daughter by beating up the rapist. In a similar scene in Sarkar, Sarkar’s lieutenants murder the rapist as he steps out of an expensive car parked at the entrance to a five-star hotel. As Al Pacino succeeds the old don, Sarkar’s “good son” agonizes over his family obligations. Ultimately, he sacrifices a peaceful domestic life in America with his fiancée and, instead, continues Sarkar’s tradition of vigilante justice.

The defence

Mody’s book is the prosecutor’s case against Indian elites. However, there is a defence case to be made. The defence is in the bullet points, with the prosecutor’s response in italics:

• The share of the population living below the “low” income country poverty threshold of $2.15 USD per person per day⁸ has dramatically declined since 1947. It is now only 10 per cent. The World Bank classifies India as “lower-middle” income with a recommended poverty threshold of $3.65 USD per person per day. With this somewhat higher threshold, 45 per cent of Indians are poor.
• India has had an impressive rate of per capita GDP increases since the turn of the century. The average annual increase from 2000 to 2019, the last year prior to COVID, was over 5 per cent, not as high as China but well above the increase among nearly all other “lower-middle” income countries. Despite embedded corruption and grossly inadequate public services, India illustrates that a country can achieve impressive growth rates. There is a ceiling to per capita GDP of “low middle” income countries with lamentable social services and high corruption. All “upper middle” income countries, such as China and Malaysia, deliver tolerably good education and health services.
• Over the last 50 years, Indian life expectancy at birth has risen from about 50 to 70. The life expectancies at birth for both Sri Lanka and China are higher.
• If we compare India 75 years after independence to, say, Britain 75 years after the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, we should discuss the Great Exhibition of 1851. It was an overly self-satisfied celebration of the British economy. It took another century before Clement Atlee, Labour Prime Minister following World War II, created adequate universal social services in the U.K. This is a legitimate argument against the British, but in post-1947 India everyone expected better than Britain in 1851.
• Mody elaborates on the role of corruption in destroying the environment of the subcontinent. For example, the air in India’s megacities is undeniably dangerous to human health, but probably no worse than the air in London as described by Dickens in Bleak House (published in 1853). Given rising temperatures and sea levels, we cannot wait for a century before Indian elites assume social responsibilities.

These are five credible qualifications but, were I the judge, I would still endorse Mody, the prosecutor.

Continue reading “India’s Corruption Through Three Lenses” →

Wole Soyinka, Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth. New York: Pantheon, 2021. 464 pages.

For many years, I have known of Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s most prominent literary figure, as a prolific writer of plays and poetry, plus a few novels. I knew that he had won the Nobel Prize for literature (long ago, in 1986). At age 87, he has published a new novel, a devastating satire on the failings of his homeland. I admit that Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth is the first major work of Soyinka that I have read.

In his review in the Guardian (see accompanying article), Ben Okri, a Nigerian writer who fled his home country in the 1970s under death threats, characterizes Chronicles as “a vivid and wild romp through a political landscape riddled with corruption and opportunism and a spiritual landscape riddled with fraudulence and, even more disquietingly, state-sanctioned murder. This is a novel written at the end of an artist’s tether.” The key difference between Soyinka and many African writers is his insistence that, whatever the sins of colonialism, postcolonial African elites enjoy “agency” and writers should hold them accountable for the outcomes in the countries they govern.

With more than 200 million people, Nigeria has the largest population of any African country – nearly double that of the second, Ethiopia. Currently, both are enmeshed in civil war: the Tigray attempt to secede from Addis Ababa and the Boko Haram attempt to install a violent version of Salafist Islam across northern Nigeria and elsewhere in the Sahel. Like many African countries, Nigeria’s boundaries reflect colonial administration, not ethnic or tribal communities. Nigeria’s three major ethnic groups are the Muslim Hausa in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest and the Igbo in the southeast. Post-independence, citizens of Nigeria would probably have been, if not the happiest people in the world, at least happier had they been citizens of three sovereign countries, enabling each of the three major communities to construct a society compatible with its ethnic heritage. Probably, but not certainly – there is no certainty in such speculation.

The one event in Nigeria known by at least some Canadians (mostly those of my generation, the generation that came of age in the 1960s) is the fate of the Igbo-dominated breakaway republic of Biafra, which lasted from May 1967 to January 1970. It ended after the Yoruba- and Hausa-dominated army imposed a brutal blockade that resulted in mass starvation, with Biafran deaths estimated at approximately one million. It was a cause célèbre at the time: many contemporary rock stars sided with Biafra, and John Lennon returned his MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) because the U.K. supplied arms to the central government and thereby contributed to Biafra’s collapse.

The Igbo were not innocent lambs led to slaughter. Shortly after independence, political violence erupted, and Igbo elites participated in some of the politically inspired assassinations over the decade. In early 1967, leaders of the army and regional political leaders met in Aburi, Ghana, in an eleventh-hour attempt to avoid civil war. The core of the Aburi Accord was transformation of the country into a decentralized federation with significant powers accorded to each of three regions. All representatives at Aburi signed the accord, but General Yakubu Gowon, head of the national government, never allowed it to be proclaimed.

Soyinka’s roots are with the Yoruba. His family descended from the royal family of Isara, one of several Yoruba dynasties. His father was an Anglican pastor and school headmaster, his mother an ardent Christian feminist. In the years leading to Biafra’s secession, Soyinka held a comfortable position as Chair of Drama at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s first university to grant degrees. In a quixotic attempt to avoid the looming civil war, Soyinka secretly met with Colonel Ojukwu, military governor in the Igbo southeast. When his unofficial intervention became known, Soyinka was arrested and kept in solitary for nearly two years. Another quixotic attempt to hold politicians accountable came three decades later, in the 1990s. Soyinka publicly condemned Sani Abacha, the general then running the national government. Soyinka was obliged to flee Nigeria, which he did on his motorcycle. Abacha arranged a trial in absentia, which resulted in Soyinka’s being condemned to execution.

The Igbos lost their independence, but they have won the historical interpretation of events. Long after the civil war, in 2006, Chimamanda Adichie, an Igbo, published an award-winning novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (the title refers to Biafra’s flag).¹ The novel is the equivalent of Tolstoy’s treatment of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. Another Igbo writer, Chinua Achebe, served as a Biafran cabinet minister during the war and 40 years later published his memoir, There was a Country.²  The following is an excerpt from the memoir – the parallel with the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is obvious:

Said Baroness Asquith in the British House of Lords, “Thanks to the miracle of television we see history happening before our eyes. We see no Igbo propaganda; we see the facts.” Following the blockade imposed by the Nigerian government, “Biafra” became synonymous with the tear-tugging imagery of starving babies with blown-out bellies, skulls with no subcutaneous fat harboring pale, sunken eyes in sockets that betrayed their suffering. Someone speaking in London in the House of Commons or the House of Lords would talk about history’s happening all around them, but for those of us on the ground in Biafra, where this tragedy continued to unfold, we used a different language … the language and memory of death and despair, suffering and bitterness. The agony was everywhere. The economic blockade put in place by Nigeria’s federal government resulted in shortages of every imaginable necessity, from food and clean water to blankets and medicines. The rations had gone from one meal a day to one meal every other day—to nothing at all. Widespread starvation and disease of every kind soon set in. The suffering of the children was the most heart-wrenching.

Achebe’s most famous novel is his first, published a decade prior to Biafran secession. Things Fall Apart is the iconic novel about cultural disruption arising from Europeans’ intrusion on Africa’s tribal societies. In English-language schools and universities throughout Africa, it is on all relevant reading lists. Achebe’s novel has been linked to Soyinka’s famous play, Death and the King’s Horseman, written in the 1970s. The play is inspired by an actual event: a colonial official prevented the suicide of the horseman of a recently deceased tribal chief. According to Yoruba tradition, once dead, the horseman guides the chief to his life after death. Like Achebe’s novel, the play deals with incompatibility of Western and traditional cultures. Soyinka wrote an introduction in which he insisted that the play was an indictment as much of traditional African culture that sanctioned suicide as of imperial hubris. The play is set during World War II, when modern “civilized” countries were engaged in an all-consuming war. In 2009, the Guardian interviewed Soyinka on a London performance of the play:

I find it necessary to caution the would-be producer of this play against a sadly familiar reductionist tendency … At the time , the tendency – in the theatre, the cinema and the novel – was to present everything that dealt with things outside western culture as being understandable only as a “clash of cultures”. This covered everything, and it encouraged analytical laziness.³

Soyinka is not a guerrilla opponent of a corrupt national government. He is among the elite of west Africa. His best historical precedent is perhaps Voltaire. On occasion, Voltaire avoided prison by fleeing abroad (to Switzerland); at other times, European royal circles feted him. Though a critic of the “ancien régime,” Voltaire did not share the revolutionary ideas of contemporaries such as Rousseau. Soyinka has refused to identify with Marxist colleagues who blame all on French and British colonialism. His critique: Third World Marxism is reductive and ignores the complex realities of postcolonial societies. Soyinka has taken his distance from Léopold Sédar Senghor’s ideas of négritude, which he views as a romantic attempt to paint precolonial African society as ideal.⁴ A recent documentary film has used asynchronous film clips of Senghor and Soyinka elaborating on their respective literary and political ideas.⁵

When I searched for a Canadian review of Soyinka’s Chronicles in a national newspaper, all I found was this squib in the Globe and Mail:

Half a century after his last novel, the playwright and Nobel-winner returns to the form with aplomb in a bustling satirical tale about contemporary Nigeria, one of whose most memorable characters is Kighare Menka, a surgeon who runs a lucrative side business selling the amputated limbs and organs of suicide-bombing victims.

The squib is a testament to parochialism among Globe journalists. Not only is the brevity an insult to Soyinka; the squib’s author lost the plot. Probably, he or she never read the novel. Far from running the “lucrative side business,” Menka plays the role of Voltaire’s Candide, the naive moralist horrified by the lucrative elite-managed secret society that sells amputated limbs. The source of body parts is Boko Haram’s tactics and application of shari’a in northern Nigeria. (Spoiler alert: at the head of the society are the Machiavellian Nigerian prime minister and a prominent religious leader in the tradition of Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry.)

Chronicles has parallels with Dostoyevsky’s finale, The Brothers Karamazov. In both novels, a whodunit mystery is a central plot device enabling the exhaustive discussion of a wide range of human behaviours and beliefs among closely entwined characters who enter into multiple conversations. Not until the final chapter in each novel does the reader discover who murdered a central character. The Brothers Karamazov was Dostoyevsky’s last major piece of writing; given his age, Chronicles may well be Soyinka’s. I hope not.

A Novel Written at the End of an Artist’s Tether

by Ben Okri

Ben Okri is a Nigerian poet and novelist, forced to flee his country in the 1970s. He won the Booker prize with his novel The Famished Road. Reprinted by permission from the Guardian, September 27, 2021.

Soyinka’s new novel tells the multidimensional story of a secret society dealing in human parts for sacrificial uses, whose members encompass the highest political and religious figures in the land. It details how the conspiracy and cover-up of this quasi-organisation affect not only the life of the nation but, more specifically, the lives of four friends. This is essentially a whistleblower’s book. It is a novel that explodes criminal racketeering of a most sinister and deadly kind that is operating in an African nation uncomfortably like Nigeria. It is a vivid and wild romp through a political landscape riddled with corruption and opportunism and a spiritual landscape riddled with fraudulence and, even more disquietingly, state-sanctioned murder. This is a novel written at the end of an artist’s tether. It has gone beyond satire. It is a vast danse macabre. It is the work of an artist who finally has found the time and the space to unleash a tale about all that is rotten in the state of Nigeria. No one else can write such a book and get away with it and still live and function in the very belly of the horrors revealed. But then no other writer has Soyinka’s unique positioning in the political and cultural life of his nation.

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth opens with the sentence: “Papa Davina … preferred to craft his own words of wisdom. Such, for instance, was his famous ‘perspective is all.’” This alerts us from the beginning that we need aesthetic distance to make sense of the twists and turns, the baroque engineering, the curious structure and the paradoxically exuberant tone of this strange novel.

Papa Davina is the religious guru, whose all-purpose spiritual ministry, Ekumenica, is an elaborate front for practices so sordid and monstrous that even when one learns what they are the mind still refuses to grasp them. He is in cahoots with the head of state, the wily and pragmatic Sir Goddie, and it seems that this racket, this secret society, encompasses the entire power structure of the land. Is this a metaphor for the extreme nature of corruption and lies that strangles the life out of that potentially great nation or is it a case where the metaphor is in fact the thing itself? If the latter, then the writer is dealing with one of the most existential problems in fiction, which is how a writer deals with the unspeakable in a medium in which things must be spoken of and a story told. How do you tell a story of the unspeakable?

Soyinka is one of Africa’s most representative writers. A poet, playwright, essayist, memoirist, activist and novelist, he was jailed in the 60s for his outspoken condemnation of the Nigerian civil war and was the first African recipient of the Nobel prize for literature in 1986. He has been one of the most caustic critics of dictatorships and bad governance in Nigeria.ᵃ This novel is the fruit of all that experience. It is his first in 48 years and only his third. His debut, The Interpreters, was the story of a generation of friends, each one representing one of the gods or goddesses of the Yoruba pantheon. It opens with the sentence: “Metal on concrete jars my drink lobes.” His second, Season of Anomy, was his fictional and poetic response to the Nigerian civil war. In the intervening years he has written more than 20 plays, poems, autobiographies, polemics and various forms of literary hand grenades. Apparently it took the forced solitude of lockdown to compel him to finally write the novel he has carried in him for some time.

It is a portrait of how a generation betrays and is betrayed by the prevailing ethos of moral entropy At the heart of Chronicles … is the tale of a quartet of friends who form themselves into a fraternity called the Gong of Four and how they maintain their integrity and are drawn into the maelstrom of political life that surrounds them. In a microcosmic sense it is a portrait of how a generation betrays and is betrayed by the prevailing ethos of moral entropy.

One thing to be clear about from the outset is that with certain writers of highly individualised voices, highly cultivated ways of seeing, there is nothing you can do about their styles. It is an inescapable fruit of how they see the world. Like Henry James,ᵇ like Conrad, like Nabokov,ᶜ there is no choice but to get used to the style, to saturate yourself in it. But once you nestle into that tone, something wonderful happens and a rollercoaster ride of enormous vitality is the result.

It is a high-wire performance sustained for more than 400 pages and it makes for uncomfortable and despairing reading, but always elevated with a robust sense of humour and the true satirist’s unwillingness to take the pretensions of power seriously, even when it is murderous in effect.

There are many things to remark upon in this Vesuvius of a novel, not least its brutal excoriation of a nation in moral free fall. The wonder is how Soyinka managed to formulate a tale that can carry the weight of all that chaos. With asides that are polemics, facilitated with a style that is over-ripe, its flaws are plentiful, its storytelling wayward, but the incandescence of its achievement makes these quibbles inconsequential.

If you want to know what kind of novel can be written by someone who has survived as a sort of insider in a difficult land but who has kept their creative conscience and their powers of invention alive then Chronicles… answers that question. It is Soyinka’s greatest novel, his revenge against the insanities of the nation’s ruling class and one of the most shocking chronicles of an African nation in the 21st century. It ought to be widely read.

Continue reading “Nigeria’s Voltaire, or Maybe Dostoyevsky” →

Mario Polèse, Le miracle québécois : récit d’un voyageur d’ici et d’ailleurs. Montreal: Boréal, 2021. 336 pages.

His parents were Viennese. His mother was a Jew. Not surprisingly, they fled after the Anschluss in 1938. Mario Polèse was born in Holland, in 1943. His parents subsequently emigrated to the United States, where Mario obtained his PhD in urban studies from the University of Pennsylvania. He came to Montreal as a young academic – and decided to integrate into francophone Quebec. His first language is German, his second Dutch, his third English. French, his fourth language, is now, in the jargon of the Canadian census, his “language most used at home.”

Le miracle québécois is, in a sense, a lengthy “love letter” to Quebec francophones who, against the odds, have survived as a nation over two and a half centuries.¹ Polèse is diplomatic: he does not enter into partisan jibes at individual politicians, nor is he hostile to English-speaking Canadians. He apologizes for not addressing the problems faced by francophone Canadians outside Quebec, in particular Acadians, in his book. Nor, he acknowledges, does his book address the problems facing the Indigenous population, inside and outside Quebec.

Polèse begins with a 1960 quote from a prominent French academic:

A powerful sentiment underlying all ideas among French Canadians is their sense of inferiority in the province their ancestors created. The inferiority is real: the levers of command, in finance, industry, large firms, are all in the hands of English-speaking strangers.²

His opening paragraph summarizes the “miracle”:

The miracle is first the history of cohabitation of two peoples on the same territory and in the same city, two peoples separated originally by religion and language. It is the history of eliminating the social gulf between two peoples, the elimination of a historical relation of domination. It is, finally, the history of a cultural revolution, of a people who literally metamorphose – who transform their institutions, change social norms and change the definition of their nation.³

The Quiet Revolution

Polèse divides Quebec’s Quiet Revolution into two phases. The first was expansion of the Quebec government in the early 1960s, triggered by the équipe du tonnerre of Premier Jean Lesage. René Levesque, a member of the équipe, championed nationalization of the Quebec electric power system. Eric Kierans, a close friend of Lévesque’s, played an important role in maintaining the financial credibility of Quebec’s government.⁴ The single most important accomplishment of the first phase was creation of a modern state-run education system, from primary school to a network of new francophone universities – plus the innovation of cegeps – general and vocational colleges – as an accessible introduction for those wanting to pursue postsecondary studies. Before 1964, publicly funded Catholic and Protestant schools operated autonomously, with little state involvement.

The second phase was the necessary promotion of French and limitation of access to English-language public schools. Bill 101, adopted in 1977, was needed to ensure that Quebec’s future would belong to well-educated francophones – and not to well-educated immigrants integrating into the anglophone community.

As an aside, Polèse mentions the prominent bust of Camille Laurin, the articulate champion of Bill 101 in the first Parti Québécois government, in front of Office Québécois de la Langue Française headquarters in Montreal. Laurin’s accomplishment is not without critics. Some argue that Bill 101 has not adequately limited access to public English-language education and that French linguistic hegemony in Montreal remains in doubt; some argue that linguistic protection unnecessarily accelerated Montreal’s loss of status as a finance and head office city and increased its unemployment rate. Polèse interprets the second argument as the unavoidable cost of survival of French as the dominant lingua franca in the province.

At one level, Polèse’s book is a discussion of the Quiet Revolution’s success in closing many of the socioeconomic gaps present in 1960. In point form, here are key statistics he cites, along with a few others I’ve added:

Education

• Average years of education among nonagricultural ethnic groups in Quebec, 1961: German 10.2 years, British 9.6, Jewish 9.5, French 7.0, Italian 5.5.
• The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is the most credible comparative assessment of secondary school systems in 80 middle- and high-income countries. Canada fared well in the most recent PISA round, conducted in 2018. Disaggregated by province, Quebec’s 2018 comprehensive PISA score was significantly better than the nine other provinces in mathematics (Quebec 532, rest of Canada 507) and close to the national average in reading (Quebec 519, Canada 520) and science (Quebec 522, Canada 518).

Income

• Average annual male earnings in Quebec, by ethnicity, 1961: British $4,940, Jewish $4,851, German $4,254, French $3,185, Italian $2,938.
• In 1961, learning French was of minor value to anglophones, while learning English was of substantial value to francophones. Francophone-anglophone earnings premium in Quebec by French-English bilingualism, 1961: anglophone, bilingual $6,049, unilingual $5,929; francophone, bilingual $4,523, unilingual $3,107.
• Quebec’s family income has risen from 70 per cent of Ontario’s in 1960 to above 90 per cent of Ontario’s in 2015.

Integration of immigrants into French as opposed to English

• In the quarter century from the end of World War II to 1970, the share of immigrants’ children enrolled in English-medium schools rose from 50 to 90 per cent.
• In 1976, 20 per cent of students with neither French nor English as mother tongue attended French-medium schools. By 2015, this figure had risen to 90 per cent.
• In 1971, the share of Quebecers using French as home language was about 80 per cent. In the 1970s, projections indicated that the share of Quebecers speaking French at home would consistently decline, especially in Montreal. This has not happened. However, on the basis of census data from 2001 to 2016, Charles Castonguay concludes that French as the major home language declined from 83.1 to 80.6 per cent.⁵

Income inequality

• Since 1990 income distribution, as measured by the Gini coefficient, has consistently been somewhat more equal in Quebec than in Ontario and in Canada overall.

Québécois pragmatism

Let me turn to Polèse as amateur political scientist and historian.

As the son of parents forced to flee a cosmopolitan city in a small country – with a large neighbour intent on establishing an empire based on German cultural superiority and antisemitism – Polèse emphasizes the rarity of successful countries containing multiple national communities. Perhaps the Slovak initiation of a separatist initiative, culminating in the 1993 “velvet divorce” in Czechoslovakia, is a European equivalent of peaceful resolution of Quebec’s secessionist movement. No one would describe interethnic relations in Ulster or Belgium as “velvet” or “quiet.” In France, third-generation Maghrebi immigrants are less integrated into French society than first-generation ones. Terrorism by Muslims in France over the previous decade, combined with large-scale Maghrebi immigration, elevated immigration as the dominant theme of the 2022 French presidential election.

The exceptionalism of (usually) respectful relations between Québécois and the rest of Canada is worth emphasizing. Many cases can be cited in which interethnic conflicts over the last half century have escalated beyond tension to civil war.

Immediately following collapse of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia erupted in civil war. Africa and the Middle East contain multiple festering ethnic and religious conflicts motivated by communities that perceive themselves as exploited. The Igbo in southeastern Nigeria harbour bitter memories from the Biafran genocide 50 years ago (see my review of Wole Soyinka’s novel elsewhere in this issue). Rural Muslim nomads and villagers throughout the west African Sahel resent more prosperous urban elites, in countries from Mauritania to Nigeria.

The Tutsi, victims of the Hutu-inspired genocide in the 1990s, now control Rwanda via an astute dictator who has been in power for nearly three decades. Since the death of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1975, Ethiopia has known a Marxist military dictator, a war culminating in Eritrean separation, Tigray dominance for a quarter century and currently a second civil war pitting Tigray against the central government in Addis Adaba. With the exception of Somaliland, Somalia has degenerated into an anarchic dystopia. One could name many other such conflicts – from Mozambique to Sudan, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

In 1759, Wolfe defeated Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. Had Polèse read Gary Caldwell’s 2001 review article in Inroads, he might have discussed the crucial role of Sir Guy Carleton, an Anglo-Irish Protestant who was governor of Quebec between 1768 and 1778. Carleton was in London in 1774 and his advice prevailed in drafting the Quebec Act: the Catholic Church preserved its status.⁶ The major argument of Carleton and his allies was that London needed to avoid a repeat of the “imbroglio” of Protestant rule imposed on Catholic Ireland. Support for the Quebec Act was far from universal. A century earlier, James II had attempted a Catholic restoration and the Whigs agreed with the American revolutionaries that a law legitimizing “papist intolerance” should not be enacted. Passage of the act depended on royalist members of Parliament opposed to liberal Whig sentiment.

Polèse discusses the response of the Continental Congress, for which the Quebec Act was one more reason to reject British rule. Benjamin Franklin, a sophisticated diplomat fluent in French, headed the delegation that visited Quebec in 1775, with the intent of gaining Québécois support for the forthcoming revolution. Carleton praised the sophistication of the Catholic bishops who led resistance to Franklin’s proposal. The Quebec Act was, for them, a “bird in the hand” relative to Franklin’s promise of “two in the bush.”

Similarly, in 1812, American elites considered the war with Britain an opportune moment to eliminate all British presence in North America. In correspondence in 1812, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “The acquisition of Canada this year, as far as the neighborhood of Quebec, will be a mere matter of marching; & will give us experience for the attack of Halifax the next, & the final expulsion of England from the American continent.” Again, the Catholic bishops made a pragmatic decision. They sided with the Loyalists in Upper Canada in opposition to the Americans.

Lord Durham was a Whig. He had no animus toward Québécois but assumed they were constrained by papist intolerance of modernity. His report in response to the Patriote rebellion of 1837 recommended unification of Lower and Upper Canada, which would dilute the influence of the Catholic bishops and prove beneficial for both Loyalists and Québécois. Polèse poses the question, “In the 19th century, could Quebec indulge the luxury of a liberal Quebec, laïc in the French anticlerical tradition? My blunt response is ‘no.’” However noble the Patriote revolt, Polèse is relieved that it failed. Had it succeeded, the Americans would inevitably have subjugated Lower Canada – and probably Upper Canada. Once again, Québécois pragmatism prevailed.

And again in 1867. The bishops supported the British North America Act, which replaced Durham’s union with a federation. Confederation restored a provincial government dominated by Québécois, a government with substantial – if constrained – powers. Polèse does not discuss a relevant detail: pre-1949, the ultimate court of appeal on constitutional matters was the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. Much to the distaste of John A. Macdonald, in several important cases the Judicial Committee strengthened interpretation of provincial powers under section 92.

The consistent theme of Quebec history from 1759 to 1960 is that the Catholic Church was the sole powerful institution committed to the national survival of the Québécois. Neither the British nor the Americans could be trusted, but the British proved more willing to accept Quebec autonomy than the Americans would have been, had Quebec chosen American allies.

Polèse admits that, over the 200-year period, Quebec women paid a price for loyalty to the church. The local priests advocated “la revanche des berceaux” – good Catholics should have large families to maintain Quebec’s population relative to English-speaking Canadians. At the turn of the 20th century, the total fertility rate in Quebec was an average of 4 children born per woman. By 1960 it had fallen to 3, but it was still well above the Canadian average. The political revolution in Quebec in the 1960s was accompanied by dramatic changes in cultural expectations. Quebecers abandoned the church en masse; by 1970 the fertility rate was 2, and it is now below 1.5.

Polèse supported the Oui in two referendums, but, in retrospect he is not bitter over the fact that Quebec remains a unit within a federal state as opposed to a sovereign country. Québécois pragmatically appreciate their accomplishments since 1960 and acknowledge the advantages of an alliance with the rest of Canada. Belonging to a country of 40 million, as opposed to one of nine million, probably provides Québécois with a better chance of national survival than would a rancorous separation. Polèse concludes with a caveat:

Does the undeniable success of Bill 101 as an instrument of integration mean that the battle for French hegemony in Quebec has been won? No. It will never be won definitively … English, the language with which French is competing, is not just any language. It has become the dominant world language in commerce and science, as well as being the majority language in Canada and North America. Any Québécois with the slightest ambition to undertake international professional activity must learn the language of Shakespeare … To refer to my country of birth, any self-respecting Dutch person speaks English and does so well.⁷

The caveat is timely. This spring, the Quebec government enacted Bill 96, legislation intended to limit the share of places in English-language cegeps accessible to those whose education has been in French and to strengthen requirements for use of French in large firms. Predictably, the anglophone community in Quebec and editorialists at the Globe and Mail and National Post oppose the bill. Perhaps details of the bill should be amended, perhaps not. Canada is a successful federation that the majority of Québécois support – provided that the rest of Canada accepts jurisdiction of the Quebec National Assembly over language policy and resists the temptation to create a fuss based on Charter language rights promoted by Pierre Trudeau.⁸

If there is a major omission by Polèse, it is absence of discussion of these language rights. In its enthusiasm to invoke the Charter, the Supreme Court expanded French-English rights in a commercial context in its 1988 Ford decision. That decision generated militant Québécois opposition to Quebec’s federal status and catalyzed the dynamic leading to the second secession referendum in 1995.⁹

Le miracle québécois is an excellent summary of Canadian history as understood by the majority of Québécois. It is a book that non-francophone Canadians should read. Hopefully, there will be an English translation.

Continue reading “Love Letter to Quebec” →