suffer anguish in using English, as James Joyce so memorably reminds us. Perhaps the real difference with Africa is the sheer size, the continental scale of the problem, and also—let’s face it—we look quite different from the English, the French, or the Portuguese!
In 1962 we saw the gathering together of a remarkable generation of young African men and women who were to create within the next decade a corpus of writing which is today seriously read and critically evaluated in many parts of the world.It was an enormously important moment, and year, in the history of modern African literature. The gathering took place at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
The other event of 1962 was not as widely publicized as the Makerere Conference, but it was to prove at least as portentous. It was the decision by one farsighted London publisher to launch the African Writers Series on the basis of no more than three or four published titles. Conventional wisdom in the book business at the time was inclined to dismiss the whole enterprise as a little harebrained. But in the next twenty-five years this series was to publish more than three hundred titles and establish itself without any doubt as the largest and best library of African literature in existence.
It was my good fortune to be linked closely with both events. I was present in Makerere among colleagues young, hopeful, and self-assured. I heard Christopher Okigbo, who was to die four years later fighting for Biafra, declare in his high-pitched, cracked-bell voice that he wrote his poetry only for poets. Another Nigerian poet, looking around him, pronounced East Africa a cultural desert. And I heard Wole Soyinka, sitting across the hall from me, recite lines of poetic parody he had just composed in mockery of Sedar Senghor.
But it was not all plain sailing, in spite of our youth and optimism and an altogether heady confidence in our future as creative artists and in the future of our newly independent (or about-to-become-independent) nations. We had this problem of definition. What was African literature? And it was, more than anything else, a question created by the anomaly of Africans writing in European languages, a phenomenonimposed on us by a history which was peculiarly, and painfully, African. When people say to you, “Europeans write in European languages; why don’t Africans write in African languages?” they are indulging in perhaps well-meaning but quite ignorant and meaningless comparison.
As for the African Writers Series in that same eventful year of 1962, I was invited to be its founding editor and I was to spend a considerable part of my literary energy in the following ten years wading through a torrent of good, bad, and indifferent writing that seemed in some miraculous way to have been waiting behind the sluice gates for the trap to be released. All of this stuff was written in English. How can one explain this?
Our acts and motives as writers seem to be in need of careful, and even repeated, explanation these days. We must justify what we do over and over again—“for the avoidance of doubt,” as legal draftsmen in military regimes are fond of saying in their numerous decrees. Perhaps it is a sign of our incompetence that the case was not made clearly and unambiguously in the first instance.
The story was told me by an elder in my village about a drummer long ago who was not very competent on the drum but who managed to achieve a kind of fame by an open admission of his shortcoming. Like better drummers, he would name and salute a notable arriving at a ceremony. Having done this in drum language, our drummer would proceed, for the avoidance of doubt, to inform the person concerned by word of mouth that the drum had just saluted him.
I thought I had already spoken all the words I needed to speak on our predicament with language in African literature,but perhaps my intentions were not well enough translated to the drumsticks. So let me try
In 1962 we saw the gathering together of a remarkable generation of young African men and women who were to create within the next decade a corpus of writing which is today seriously read and critically evaluated in many parts of the world.It was an enormously important moment, and year, in the history of modern African literature. The gathering took place at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.
The other event of 1962 was not as widely publicized as the Makerere Conference, but it was to prove at least as portentous. It was the decision by one farsighted London publisher to launch the African Writers Series on the basis of no more than three or four published titles. Conventional wisdom in the book business at the time was inclined to dismiss the whole enterprise as a little harebrained. But in the next twenty-five years this series was to publish more than three hundred titles and establish itself without any doubt as the largest and best library of African literature in existence.
It was my good fortune to be linked closely with both events. I was present in Makerere among colleagues young, hopeful, and self-assured. I heard Christopher Okigbo, who was to die four years later fighting for Biafra, declare in his high-pitched, cracked-bell voice that he wrote his poetry only for poets. Another Nigerian poet, looking around him, pronounced East Africa a cultural desert. And I heard Wole Soyinka, sitting across the hall from me, recite lines of poetic parody he had just composed in mockery of Sedar Senghor.
But it was not all plain sailing, in spite of our youth and optimism and an altogether heady confidence in our future as creative artists and in the future of our newly independent (or about-to-become-independent) nations. We had this problem of definition. What was African literature? And it was, more than anything else, a question created by the anomaly of Africans writing in European languages, a phenomenonimposed on us by a history which was peculiarly, and painfully, African. When people say to you, “Europeans write in European languages; why don’t Africans write in African languages?” they are indulging in perhaps well-meaning but quite ignorant and meaningless comparison.
As for the African Writers Series in that same eventful year of 1962, I was invited to be its founding editor and I was to spend a considerable part of my literary energy in the following ten years wading through a torrent of good, bad, and indifferent writing that seemed in some miraculous way to have been waiting behind the sluice gates for the trap to be released. All of this stuff was written in English. How can one explain this?
Our acts and motives as writers seem to be in need of careful, and even repeated, explanation these days. We must justify what we do over and over again—“for the avoidance of doubt,” as legal draftsmen in military regimes are fond of saying in their numerous decrees. Perhaps it is a sign of our incompetence that the case was not made clearly and unambiguously in the first instance.
The story was told me by an elder in my village about a drummer long ago who was not very competent on the drum but who managed to achieve a kind of fame by an open admission of his shortcoming. Like better drummers, he would name and salute a notable arriving at a ceremony. Having done this in drum language, our drummer would proceed, for the avoidance of doubt, to inform the person concerned by word of mouth that the drum had just saluted him.
I thought I had already spoken all the words I needed to speak on our predicament with language in African literature,but perhaps my intentions were not well enough translated to the drumsticks. So let me try
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