Items

• Writing in West Africa: A Chance to Adapt and to Experiment

  [Excerpt]: "Visitors to West Africa have often remarked that whereas in French territories Africans speak either immaculate French or none at all, in British West Africa many speak some form of broken or pidgin English. Mostly this is attributed to the fact that the French built far fewer schools than the British, but provided a thorough secondary education. At the same time it was their avowed policy to assimilate Africans to French culture. Since they claimed that West Africa was not really a colony but "France Outre-Mer", Africans were considered as underprivileged only as long as they did not have a French education... On the other hand Nigeria made a very late start. There was nothing at all before Mr. Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard, which was published in 1952. Even then it took years before literature in Nigeria got off the ground. But the past few years have seen a literary activity here that equals anything in French West Africa. There are at least four novelists of interest: Achebe, Ekwensi, Nzekwu and Babatunde Jones (the last unpublished); there are lively poets: Okara, Soyinka, Clark and Okigbo--the first two represented on the previous page. There are the playwrights: Soyinka, Clark, Yetunde Esan. The place is full of literary criticism and controversy; there are literary journals, clubs and associations." ...
• World Service

  "Today 7:15 Off The Shelf: African Stories. Civil Peace, by Chinua Achebe."
• World Service

  "8:15 Off The Shelf: Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe. An exiled warrior returns to his village."
• Words soften Biafra's defeat

  "The Federal Government of Nigeria was reported last week to be purging the Civil Service, weeding out officials who were thought to have aided Biafra during the civil war."
• Women out the classics in the academe's war of words

  "Top 12 Modern Novelists"
• Witness to man's inhumanity

  "Antjie Krog, the author of Country of My Skull, is a South African poet and journalist who headed the SABC's team that reported, daily, for two years, on the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She did an excellent job at some personal cost. As the stories of torture, shootings, burnings, and maimings roll on, she suffers stress-related hair loss and facial rashes. She learns quickly what can and cannot be broadcast..."
• Winter of Discontent

  The article is an excerpt from James Callaghan's memoir as the former prime minister of Britain. At one point, he quotes Roy Campbell: "I summed up the situation to my private secretary, Kenneth Stowe, in a verse I am apt to quote when faced with a thicket of procedure but little substance. It is by Roy Campbell, the South African poet: You praise the firm restraint with which they write-- / I'm with you there of course; / They use the snaffle and the bit all right, / But where's the bloody horse?"
• Winning struggle to reestablish African culture alongside the economic revolution

  "Although economic considerations now outweigh most others in the minds of most African people and their leaders in their quest for national images, there is in Nigeria, as in many other African countries, a growing cultural awareness in the face of the political turmoil that plagues most of the continent....Haunted by the knowledge that these ancient kingdoms [of Africa] had well-developed cultural and political organizations of their own, today's African countries are at the crossroads...The dilemma of most African countries is to find that way forward which involves a marriage between economics, culture and politics..."
• Why South Africa put its leading Afrikaans poet on trial

  One of the most important political trials to take place in South Africa for some time began on Friday when Mr. Breyten Breytenbach, the avant-garde Afrikaans poet and writer, appeared in Pretoria's palace of justice on charges of terrorism and furthering the aims of communism - both capital offences. He has pleaded guilty to some of the charges and the trial is expected to end this week. Mr Breytenbach, who is arguably the greatest living Afrikaans writer and whose works are required reading in most South African universities, faces 14 main allegations by the state. Chief among them is that he planned to set up an illegal organization known as "Atlas" or "Okhela," whose aim, according to the 18 page charge sheet, was to hand over power to Black Africans or set up a "Communist" society. [Article continues with an exploration of unrest and political arrests in South Africa.]
• Why aren't all schools ready for everyone?

  "It was nearly struck nearly two years that there was no millennium project the English language and English literature, surely two of this country's greatest contributions to the world in the past 1000's years."
• Who Won What in 1987

  "As literary prizes proliferate, here is a guide to where the prestige - and the money - went during the year."
• Where Britannia ruled, she also served

  "I am no astrologer but there is something about the last decade of each century that stirs the juices of adventure."
• What's good for the Luo

  [Godfrey Lienhardt reviews Traditional Ideology and Ethics among the Southern Luo]: "President Kenyatta's account of teh customs and values of the Kikuyu, Facing Mount Kenya, published in 1938 with an appraisal from Malinowski, is probably the best-known study of his own people in English by an African. It has been followed by many others, including several by writers coming from peoples akin to the Southern Luo, notably the historian Professor B. A. Ogot, the Acholi poet Okot p'Bitek, Dr. F. M. Deng and now A. B. C. Ochalla-Ayayo. Like Kenyatta, these later writers have been absorbed from childhood the languages and interests of their homelands, and returned to reflect on them in the light of wider anthropological knowledge."
• What the young are reading

  "An obvious key to literary immortality is to continue to attract new generation of readers."
• What Must a People Do

  "In 1962, I was sent to Nigeria to report on the ceremonies and celebrations of independence and the handover of power to the new state."
• Wednesday 6 September

  "Africa 95 - Short Story - Civil Peace, by Chinua Achebe 5:00 PM"
• Wayward and wild

  Mary married the volatile South African poet Roy Campbell, and had a range of affairs, including with Vita Sackville-West. ("Fancy being cuckolded by a woman!" was C.S. Lewis's reation when Campbell told him.)
• Ways into Africa

  [Excerpt]: "It is difficult to imagine two more different approaches to modern African literature. On the one hand there is Margaret Laurence, a novelist, looking at African novels and plays somewhat arbitrarily selected, and giving a personal interpretation. She looks at each author and each work separately. On the other hand there is Janheinz Jahn, who approaches the subject like a philosopher, less interested in giving us his personal response to this ovel or that play than in attempting to discover the underlying Weltanschauung that inspires and informs the writers of 'neo-African' literature..."
• War on His Doorstep

  "The novelist and poet Chinua Achebe, himself an Igbo, and at the time of the war himself already acclaimed as the author of Things Fall Apart, undertook many international diplomatic missions on behalf of Biafra"
• Voyage Round Soyinka

  In the article, Anthony Curtis discusses Wole Soyinka as a poet and spokesperson. Curtis writes, "[Soyinka] is able to distance himself from these situations and see them with humorous clarify as well as passionate indignation. Here is a major a writer who has faced two parallel disasters, that of being stultified by a shower of token honours in the west, and at home being put into gaol for subversion."
• Voices of Empire

  Maria Couto reviews two works, "Fault Lines" by Meena Alexander and "Unbecoming Daughters of Empire" collected and edited by Shirley Chew and Anna Rutherford. Excerpt: "Both of these books - one a memoir, the other a vivid and enthralling playback of voices - unfold private lives stamped by Empire and shaped by emerging forces of independence and nationalism... The Ghanaian novelist Ama Ata Aidoo writes of her grandfather who was tortured to death..."
• Voices from South Africa

  Laurence Whistler writes a generally praising critique of South African Poetry, complimenting Guy Butler and R. N. Currey, but suggesting "had the compilers omitted four-fifths of their contributors and increased the contributions of the remainder they could have produced an impressive anthology." At the end of his critique, Whistler questions if there is "such a thing" as South African poetry. He points out that the "liveliest creative minds" desert South Africa for England, calling them "poetic deserters."
• Voice of the poets

  "In Africa, the indigenous population have been most widely subject to these two langauges, Negritude for French-speaking Africans is a literary attitude which English-speaking Africans are apt to denigrate. But the problem of writing poetry is different for a Nigerian as opposed to a Canadian. He is aware of other languages and English may not be the language he was brought up to think in. The African Waring may still be writing in translation... [poetry excerpt] In this satirical piece young Frank Aid-Imoukhuede is so free in English he can write pigeon, know it, and have a go at western morality in a way wholly different from young David Elworthy having a go at upper-class afternoon tea in New Zealand. African poetry it seems to me must be (and is) fascinated by language... African poets like Wole Soyinka or Christopher Okigbo are entrancing and entranced by language. Either they write of people or ideas. There is no yearn for the exposition of landscape to bolster nationality. Their aim is to write like...how would this sentence go on?...Like T. S. Eliot? He may well stand for this sort of expatriate poetry."
• Violence Hits Central Johannesburg after Execution of Moloise

  International outrage and violent demonstrations in the centre of Johannesburg followed the execution yesterday in Pretoria of Benjamin Moloise, a black South African poet. The execution - carried out in spite of pleas from around the world for clemency - prompted an angry response from Commonwealth heads of government, meeting in Nassau. Efforts are under way there to draw up a joint policy aimed to end apartheid in South Africa. [Article continues to describe Margaret Thatcher's involvement, and the meeting of the Commonwealth leaders/how they plan to work to end apartheid.]
• Verbs that find themselves prepositioned

  "Jonathan Porritt concluded an article on Green politics in the recent issue of the Listener by saying: Be it as it may the Government no has an enormous challenge on its hands if its is to prevent its new environmental awareness backfiring in its face."