concern. It is about sex and reproduction through the entire range of living things, from the simplest single-cell creatures in the water to complex organisms like fishes and birds and mammals. It is a very skillful, scientific production that pulls no punches with respect to where babies come from. It is all there in its starkness. Was it necessary to conclude this graphic reproductive odyssey with man (or rather woman)? I did not think so. The point had already been more than well made withapes, including, I believe, those that invented the “missionary position.”
But the producers of the documentary were quite uncompromising in their exhaustiveness. And so a woman in labor
was
exposed to show the baby coming out of her. But the real shock for me was that everybody in that labor room was white except the Ghanaian (by her accent) mother in childbirth. Why were all the rest white? you may ask. Because this was all happening in a hospital in London, not in Accra.
I am sure that the producers of that program would reject with indignation any suggestion that their choice of candidate was influenced in any way by race. And they might even be right, to the extent that they would not have had a meeting of their production team to decide that a white woman would not be an appropriate subject. But then, such deliberations do not happen except perhaps in the crude caucuses of the lunatic fringe. Race is no longer a visible presence in the boardroom. But it may lie, unseen, in our subconscious. The lesson for that production team, for those who broadcast their product, and for the rest of us is that when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
1998
Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature
Of all the explosions that have rocked the African continent in recent decades, few have been more spectacular, and hardly any more beneficial, than the eruption of African literature, shedding a little light here and there on what had been an area of darkness.
So dramatic has been the change that I am even presuming that a few of my readers may recognize my title as a somewhat mischievous rendering of the subtitle of the book
Decolonising the Mind
, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The mischief lies in my inserting after the word “politics” the two words “and politicians,” like dropping a pair of cats among Ngũgĩ’s pigeons.
Ngũgĩ’s book argues passionately and dramatically that to speak of African literature in European languages is not only an absurdity but also part of the scheme of Western imperialism to hold Africa in perpetual bondage. He reviews his own position as a writer in English and decides that he can nolonger continue in the treachery. So he makes a public renunciation of English in a short statement at the beginning of his book. Needless to say, Ngũgĩ applies the most severe censure to those African writers who remain accomplices of imperialism, especially Senghor and Achebe, but particularly Achebe, presumably because Senghor no longer threatens anybody!
Theatricalities aside, the difference between Ngũgĩ and myself on the issue of indigenous or European languages for African writers is that while Ngũgĩ
now
believes it is
either/or
, I have always thought it was
both
.
I took my stand on this from the very beginning of my literary career, and have enunciated the position at different times and in varying forms of words. No serious writer can possibly be indifferent to the fate of any language, let alone his own mother tongue. For most writers in the world, there is never any conflict—the mother tongue and the writing language are one and the same. But from time to time, and as a result of grave historical reasons, a writer may be trapped unhappily and invidiously between two imperatives. This is not new in the world. Even in the British Isles, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots may
But the producers of the documentary were quite uncompromising in their exhaustiveness. And so a woman in labor
was
exposed to show the baby coming out of her. But the real shock for me was that everybody in that labor room was white except the Ghanaian (by her accent) mother in childbirth. Why were all the rest white? you may ask. Because this was all happening in a hospital in London, not in Accra.
I am sure that the producers of that program would reject with indignation any suggestion that their choice of candidate was influenced in any way by race. And they might even be right, to the extent that they would not have had a meeting of their production team to decide that a white woman would not be an appropriate subject. But then, such deliberations do not happen except perhaps in the crude caucuses of the lunatic fringe. Race is no longer a visible presence in the boardroom. But it may lie, unseen, in our subconscious. The lesson for that production team, for those who broadcast their product, and for the rest of us is that when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absentmindedly.
1998
Politics and Politicians of Language in African Literature
Of all the explosions that have rocked the African continent in recent decades, few have been more spectacular, and hardly any more beneficial, than the eruption of African literature, shedding a little light here and there on what had been an area of darkness.
So dramatic has been the change that I am even presuming that a few of my readers may recognize my title as a somewhat mischievous rendering of the subtitle of the book
Decolonising the Mind
, by an important African writer and revolutionary, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. The mischief lies in my inserting after the word “politics” the two words “and politicians,” like dropping a pair of cats among Ngũgĩ’s pigeons.
Ngũgĩ’s book argues passionately and dramatically that to speak of African literature in European languages is not only an absurdity but also part of the scheme of Western imperialism to hold Africa in perpetual bondage. He reviews his own position as a writer in English and decides that he can nolonger continue in the treachery. So he makes a public renunciation of English in a short statement at the beginning of his book. Needless to say, Ngũgĩ applies the most severe censure to those African writers who remain accomplices of imperialism, especially Senghor and Achebe, but particularly Achebe, presumably because Senghor no longer threatens anybody!
Theatricalities aside, the difference between Ngũgĩ and myself on the issue of indigenous or European languages for African writers is that while Ngũgĩ
now
believes it is
either/or
, I have always thought it was
both
.
I took my stand on this from the very beginning of my literary career, and have enunciated the position at different times and in varying forms of words. No serious writer can possibly be indifferent to the fate of any language, let alone his own mother tongue. For most writers in the world, there is never any conflict—the mother tongue and the writing language are one and the same. But from time to time, and as a result of grave historical reasons, a writer may be trapped unhappily and invidiously between two imperatives. This is not new in the world. Even in the British Isles, the Irish, the Welsh, and the Scots may
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