Assignment 7

Felix Mnthali: “The Stranglehold of English Lit.” (pp. 713-15)

As the biography at the end of our text points out (p. 1179), Mnthali was born in Lalawi and educated both in Africa and at Cambridge University in England. This poem raises interesting questions about the significance of literature and some hard questions for those readers who claim that a good education must include a reading of the classic canon of literature. Among the “benefits” the colonial powers brought to Africa was a school curriculum that mirrored the values and the social organization of Europe. After all, it was claimed, the literature of England (the dominant colonial power in South Africa) was recognized for its quality, and certainly the students of southern Africa would benefit by learning it. But what relevance does such literature, with its formal elegance and implied values, have for the emerging nations of Africa, nations with utterly different social forms and economic problems? Mnthali might argue, simply, that the study of English literature was irrelevant.

But Mnthali goes beyond that to insist that it is pernicious. Had Africans raised hard questions about the economics of Jane Austin’s novels–taken as an emblem of all such European “culture”–they might have prevented or shortened the period of “alien conquest.” The poem ends with a list of important African university cities, the places that educated the first generations of modern African political and social leaders, and ridicules the notion that those students should deal with questions raised by the work of Jane Austin.