A Wreath for Udomo by Peter Abrahams

First published: 1956

Type of work: Political realism

Time of work: The mid-1950’s

Locale: London, southern France, and the fictitious colonial nation of Panafrica

Principal Characters:

• Michael Udomo, Panafrica’s lifetime prime minister and charismatic leader of the revolutionary Africa Freedom Party
• Lois Barlow, his English lover
• David Mhendi, the exiled head of Pluralia’s unsuccessful Liberation Army
• Thomas Lanwood, a veteran Panafrican revolutionary and political theorist
• Richard Adebhoy, and
• Selina, staunch supporters of tribalism and nonfraternization with whites
• Paul Mabi, an expatriated Panafrican artist
• Dr. T. T. S. Endura, the secretary of the Council of Chiefs and Elders

The Novel

The novel traces the political rise and fall of Michael Udomo, the inspiring liberator of the (fictitious) nation of Panafrica from British subjugation. Ironically, his ascendancy to power begins in London, the very capital of the British empire, where he arrives a bedraggled, hungry doctoral candidate after studies in Canada and Europe.

Udomo’s education impels him to reject the heavy-handed rule of his colonizers, who would have him‘shine as another “new type of African, consciously and appreciatively learning the art of Western civilized government from his British mentors.” Thus, arriving in London as a veteran student agitator, Udomo assists in organizing a Panafrican nationalist magazine, the Liberator, with four other like-minded Africans: Thomas Lanwood, David Mhendi, Paul Mabi, and Richard Adebhoy. In addition, he becomes an engaging speaker for Africa Freedom Group, Panafrica’s fledgling revolutionary committee.

Despite temptations to settle in southern France and rear a family with his white mistress, Lois Barlow, Udomo hurries back to Queenstown, Panafrica’s seaside capital, after Adebhoy has secured enough supporters to finance a newspaper’s production. He promptly establishes the Queenstown Post in a sparsely furnished, ramshackle office. Unfortunately, his plans to foment a dockworkers’ strike are discouraged by the paper’s self-serving backers, who are using the publication to curry favors from Dr. T. T. S. Endura, the secretary of the Council of Chiefs and Elders. Rather than heed his patrons’ threats and print lies, he defiantly drafts what comes to be known by his countrymen as “the call,” a passionate challenge to Panafricans to initiate a full-scale revolution. After Udomo is imprisoned by British security police and his incendiary editions confiscated, an underground network of compatriots organizes clandestine readings of the seditious manifesto, circulates proliberation leaflets, and recruits thousands into its banned Africa Freedom Party. Finally, when even the efforts of Endura, a British collaborator, have failed to undermine the resistance, the all-white Executive Council allows elections in which Udomo’s party carries a sweeping majority.

As the first African prime minister of his country, Udomo must direct its transformation into an industrialized economy capable of harnessing water for power and mining its rich mineral deposits. Reluctantly, with the added opposition of key party members, he adopts a conciliatory policy of working with European imperialists whenever their money and expertise can advance Panafrica’s interests. This decision exacts its costliest toll when he betrays his dear friend Mhendi, who is leading a guerrilla war in neighboring Pluralia, in exchange for assistance from the racist white colonizers of that land. Thereafter, two of his own administrators, Adebhoy and the merchant woman Selina, accuse him of allowing whites to lord over the Africans and reap the rewards of black labor. Though Udomo views the tribalism promulgated by that faction as an impediment to Panafrican progress, ultimately he is defeated by it. Two painted, entranced dancers assassinate him as talking drums in the distance urge them on.

The Characters

Perhaps because of the novel’s political bent, the characters are developed largely insofar as they illuminate the vagaries of revolution. For example, the Creole Thomas Lanwood, dean of Panafrica’s freedom movement, is first mentioned under circumstances that signify the kind of political type he is. While discussing Lanwood with Lois, Udomo broods, “A man’s lonely sometimes in a strange land.” This statement ironically limns Lanwood’s predicament in the novel: the Westernized, citified African alienated from his tribal heritage, uneasy with the European one as well. Upon returning to his newly liberated homeland, Lanwood never adjusts to the smells, rituals, and language of “the real Africa.” Yet he dies a lonely man shortly after fleeing to Europe, as if that soil as well could no longer sustain him.

In a similar way, Peter Abrahams links the two principal characters, Udomo and Mhendi, to call attention to the inevitable conflicts between personal and public life. Both leaders fall in love with women who subordinate their private dreams to the political cause: Udomo with Lois and Mhendi with a Panafrican named Maria. In contrast to the messianic plans of their men, Lois and Maria prefer lives of “present fulfillment,” of simple, happy days in a bucolic setting. That both relationships end prematurely and violently suggests an incompatibility of romance with the realities of revolution.

No restless rebel or rootless outcast, Paul Mabi is not so much a type as a mouthpiece for the author himself. Mabi surfaces always to challenge Udomo: He condemns the man for betraying both Mhendi and Lois (for he impregnates her roommate). Finally, Mabi departs Panafrica in exasperation, suspecting that subsequent generations of Africans will never understand “the price at which their freedom was bought, and the share of it non-Africans . . . had to pay.” Through Mabi, Abrahams both questions and admires larger-than-life African nationalist leaders. The author may also, however, be using this spokesperson in a very personal way. When Mabi later regrets his “brand of squeamish patriotism,” Abrahams could have in mind his own displacement from his native South Africa.

Critical Context

“The least one can say is that this is not the Africa one knows,” fumed Kimani Gecau on the depiction of tribalism in this work. Besides this accusation, reviewers in addition to Gecau have charged Abrahams with developing the Udomo-led insurrection in a simplistic, truncated manner. Nevertheless, the correspondence between Panafrica’s imaginary uprising and the real nationalist takeover led by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah is an undeniable one that establishes A Wreath for Udomo as a prophetic undertaking.

Like Udomo, the Western-educated Kwame Nkrumah, a personal friend of Abrahams, returned after a decade’s absence to his West African birthplace, the Gold Coast, in order to direct the Convention People’s Party (CPP), which agitated for the complete dismantling of the British colonial government and the establishment of a self-determining, all-African administration in its place. In 1957, after a series of British concessions, constitutional changes, and election wins by the CPP, Nkrumah, who united both middle-class elitists and grass-roots tribalists, became prime minister of the first African country to declare its independence from a colonial regime. In governing the Gold Coast, however, renamed Ghana and combined with British Togoland upon its liberation, Nkrumah confronted Udomo’s problems of, on the one hand, placating tribal chiefs and, on the other, navigating his country into the modern age. Finally, a military coup overthrew his administration in the mid-1960’s.

Though these parallels are startling, given that Abrahams could not have known the outcome of the Nkrumah-headed movement, most significant is that the Ghanaian leader’s political ideas are the inspiration for the Udomo group’s own policies. As an organizer of the fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945 (from which Abrahams has clearly derived the name of Udomo’s country), Nkrumah envisioned a concord of independent African nations that integrated modern innovations with centuries-old traditions. However uneven critics declare A Wreath for Udomo to be, it is valuable because it confronts the difficulties of instituting pan-Africanism, and it does not mince the price that luminaries such as Udomo, Mhendi, and Nkrumah must pay for trying. Nor, despite the death that concludes it, does it squelch the dream that Abrahams, himself a student member of the Pan-African Federation, offers later in the essay “The Blacks” (1959): “If the men inaugurating the new ways have the sense and the patience to preserve the finer qualities of the old ways and fuse these with the new, then we can expect something magnificently new out of Africa.” Gakwandi, Shatto Arthur. The Novel and Contemporary Experience in Africa, 1977.

Bibliography

Maduka, Chukwudi T. “Colonialism, Nation-Building, and the Revolutionary Intellectual in Peter Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo,” in Journal of Southern African Affairs. II (April, 1977), pp. 245-257.

Ogungbesan, Kolawole. The Writings of Peter Abrahams, 1979.

Scanlon, Paul A. “Dream and Reality in Abrahams’ A Wreath for Udomo,” in Obsidian: Black Literature in Review. VI (Spring/Summer, 1980), pp. 25-32.

Wade, Michael. “Peter Abrahams,” in Modern African Writers, 1972. Edited by Gerald Moore.