Items

• 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."
• The Times Diary: Poetic Justice

  [Full text]: "The prosaic difficulties of a troubled world have complicated work on an international reference book on poets who write in English. With a preface by the Poet Laureate, C. Day Lewis, Contemporary Poets of the English Language is the first book on the subject for more than 10 years and the only one to include non-white poets from Asia and Africa: it will be published in October by The St. James Press of Chicago and London. Its American editor-in-chief, Mrs. Rosalie Murphy, says she ran into many problems. In Nigeria, the questionnaire sent to Wole Soyinka was not passed on to him in prison, where he has been for two years; while the entry on Christopher Okigbo had to be dropped after Mrs. Murphy had confirmed a report that he had been killed in the civil war. Then there were many black South African poets who have escaped from or otherwise left the country and still move from place to place: Bloke Modisane, believed to have left South Africa on foot in 1950, was traced to London. Minor racial complications occurred in this country, too. Most poets from Wales put down "Welsh" as their nationality, although some admitted to "Anglo-Welsh." Most Scots preferred "British," while some northern Irish put "British-Irish." In America, nearly all Negroes called themselves "Black," although LeRoi Jones added exotically "African-American-Ancient Egyptian."
• The editor lied

  John Haynes notes that this collection of African Poetry in English emphasizes poets born after 1945 and has a distinguishing factor of featuring "poetry in the shadow of police states."
• Soyinka says Nigerian gaol was 'no picnic'

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, poet, and novelist, returned to London yesterday after an absence of three years, two of which he spent in solitary confinement in a Nigerian gaol. He was never charged or tried, but his arrest in August 1967, followed a clandestine visit to what was Biafra during which he trid to persuade Colonel Ojukwu, the secessionist leader, to call off the war. The Federal Government however, asserted that Mr. Soyinka was a Biafran spy... Did he have any hard feelings? Had the iron entered his soul? That was a very large question he said, and smiled. But later he explained: "In order to function socially, normally, I have to seal the detention off completely for a while." ....
• Progress in Nigeria since civil war

  A 10-page Special Report on Nigeria will appear in The Times on Monday. Less than three years since the Biafran secession move collapsed the Nigerian civil war has been largely forgotten. Wole Soyinka, Africa's leading playwright, for whom it remains a vivid memory and who was imprisoned for nearly two years in solitary confinement, talks in the report revealingly about his country and his own future. Peter Hopkirk reports on the mood today among former Biafrans, and Cyprian Ekwensi, the novelist, writes on Africa's "rediscovery" of its cultural heritage.
• Poet tells court of 'walled pit' in prison

  Breyten Breytenbach, the award-winning Afrikaans poet, described today how he began to "doubt my sanity" in the total isolation of the "walled pit" of his maximum security cell in Pretoria Central Prison. He was giving evidence for the second day running at the Pretoria Palace of Justice where he is on trial under the Terrorism Act and 17 other charges under the Riotous Assemblies and Prisons Acts. ...He is alleged to have tried to bribe a warden to let him escape. Mr Breytenbach was arrested early in 1975 after he had returned to South Africa after years of self-imposed exile in Paris to organize white activists into bringing about radical change in South Africa.
• Playwright in Search of a Role

  Wole Soyinka has had a knack of getting into political deep water. That is why the writer, who in 1986 became the first African to win the Nobel prize for literature, has spent long periods of his life in exile. Now, at 68, he is in the gradual process of moving back to his home country, fired up with the idea of becoming more active in Nigerian politics...
• Outspoken Man of Letters

  ...Poet, dramatist, novelist, and journalist [Soyinka] personifies Nigeria's fascination with politics and the population's irrepressible urge to speak out on any and every issue... Mr. Soyinka's frankness - some would say arrogance - has landed him in trouble in the past and he was detained by the federal government for two years in 1967 when he tried his hand at resolving civil war and visited secessionist Biafra... Nigeria's Nobel prize winner, one of his compatriots told me, is part of a group of people who act as the conscience of the nation...
• News in Brief: Nigerian Author on Hunger Strike

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and university lecturer, has gone on hunger strike after being held by the police at Ibadan for nearly a week, his lawyer said today. Mr. Soyinka, whose play The Road was staged at the recent Commonwealth Arts Festival in London, gave himself up last Tuesday. A warrant had been issued for his arrest, and the police said they wanted to question him about an illicit broadcast from Ibadan.
• New writers emerge after the 'big sleep'

  [Excerpt]: "Nigerian writing received its second wind in exile. Over the past decade, a new crop of Nigerian writers, celebrated in the diaspora, has resuscitated Nigeria's literary tradition. At home, it is the business of publishing, rather than the art of writing that is uppermost in many young writers' minds. Two decades of military rule coupled with the crippling effects of Nigeria's precipitous economic decline in teh [sic] 1980s and 1990s hs left the cultural landscape in ruins... Several UK publishers, including Oxford University Press, Evans, and, most notably, Heinemann, had set up shop in Ibadan, south-west Nigeria, and were able to tap the literary talents emerging from the University of Ibadan, Nigeria's foremost seat of learning. Magazines such as Black Orpheus and The Horn, showcased the work of such writers as Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Christopher Okigbo, Elechi Amadi, Ama Ata Aidoo and Ezekiel Mphalele, the South African writer. From the 1960s and well into the 1980s and 1990s, Heinemann's African Writers Series, distributed acorss the writers into international household names..."
• Local election test for Nigerian regime

  Nigerians go to the polls tomorrow in the first test of the military government's declared intention to return the country to civilian rule by October next year. The local multi-party elections take place against a background of renewed focus on the administration's human rights record, following the charging with treason this week of 15 opposition activitists, including Mr Wole Soyinka, the Nobel prize winner...
• Life University post for Wole Soyinka

  Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright who returned home recently after a prolonged self-exile in Ghana, has been appointed professor of comparative literature at the University of Ife.
• Ironies of exile: Post-colonial homelessness and the anticlimax of return

  Lewis Nkosi reviews the book The Rift by Hilda Bernstein and comments with his own personal experience on exile in South Africa. Nkosi suggests that "In Africa, too, the moment of modernism is invariably associated with displacement, imprisonment, and exile"; he suggests that leading African writers have been imprisoned and banished in their countries, such as Wole Soyinka, Kofi Awoonor, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Nurrudin Farah, and Dambudzo Marechera. Nkosi himself was exiled from South Africa; he writes that "for many South Africans [exile was] the very condition of their existence."
• In search of a subject

  Sousa Jamba writes critical reviews of both Africa Talks Back, which contains interviews with Anglophone African authors, and The Ordeal of the African Writer, by Charles R. Larson. Of the first, Jamba writes, "Africa Talks Back... reflects the ambitions of a wide range of writers. Some of them, like the Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek, are long dead; others have gone into obscure retirement. Some, such as Chinua Achebe, Dennis Brutus, Kole Omotoso, Taban Lo Liyong and Njabulo Ndebele, are still active, thugh mainly in the academic world in the West or in South Africa... Today, the all-powerful Big Men who have dominated postcolonial Africa are slowly being forced out and institutions such as Makerere University are, very slowly, recovering their former glory..." Of the second, Jamba writes, "Charles R. Larson, a professor of literature at American University in Washington D.C. outlines some of the major obstacles facing the African writer. These are the parlous state of publishing on the continent, persecution from political authorities, and consequent exile."
• Elysee hosts stars of human rights

  An unprecedented two-day international conference on human rights ended here yesterday amid accusations from both the French Communists and the main Opposition parties that it was nothing more than a "show-business spectacle" organized by the Government for purely political reasons... included South African poet Breyton Breytenbach...
• Effects of exile

  Anthony Delius reviews two collections of poetry that both are from poets who have been or are in "exile." He suggests that in response to exile, one can become "critical of the culture left behind" or "promote it in the face of the omnipresent pressure of the culture of the place or places of refuge." Delius suggests that Lenrie Peters' work is more of the first, while Mazisi Kunene's is the second. Delius quotes, "An African critic has written that 'of all African poets of the English expression, he is the least concerned about his country and most concerned about the fate of the continent as a whole!'" Meanwhile, "Mazisi Kunene's 300-page dithyramb is dedicated to all the women of Africa, especially the renowned Zulu women, as well as to a couple of goddesses in the African pantheon... [Kunene] grew up listening to the insolent upholders of 'White Christian Civilization' who claimed that black people were unable to produce a civilization like their own or of any kind. Possibly after nearly thirty years of forced exile, Kunene still feels the need to explode that racist absurdity, as well as express his proper pride in the cultural and religious concepts of the Zulus."
• Change from below

  The determination of many autocratic rulers of independent African countries to limit freedom of expression has stunted intellectual development within their countries, degraded the quality of debate on national issues and forced many of Africa's most gifted writers into exile. In some cases, exile has nurtured creativity, giving writers the political space to reveal the disparity between official rhetoric and reality. But to many it has not been kind... Okot P'Bitek, the Ugandan poet, is not the only one who, lacking a connection to the society he longed to write about, drank himself to death... In some instances, though, the elaborate repressive apparatus of the state has stimulated creativity by compelling writers to develop subtle and imaginative ways of bypassing censorship. Jack Mapanje, Malwai's best-known poet, who was released in May last year after three-and-a-half years' detention without charge or trial, believes that the draconian measures taken by the Malawi Censorship Board may have inadvertently caused him to write better poems. However, another Malawian poet, Frank Chipasula, found that fear of informants took a heavy toll on his work...
• Behind the lines

  This article covers the two-day "crammed and curious" conference called The Politics of Exile, organized by the Third World Foundation and South magazine at the Institute for Contemporary Arts. "The real politicians had stayed away, offering a wide variety of excuses: they didn't feel like entering this kind of forum, it was too potentially compromising, they'd have to have the authority of a central committee... Instead, it was the writers and intellectuals who jostled for space in the programme to talk about the Latin American, African, Middle-Eastern, and South Asian experiences. So the politics were filtered through very self-conscious lenses." Of African poets, Sage writes, "As someone else pointed out, exiles must always be distiguished from refugees, they don't have the collective innocence of victims... Educated and articulate exiles, said the banished South African poet Dennis Brutus (famed as the inspirer of the sporting boycott), form a new wandering tribe -- the Bintu. They've been to conferences on the nature of exile just about everywhere, even Oklahoma."
• Apartheid's arch-enemy wins right of asylum

  New York writer Trevor Fishlock reports: "Dennis Brutus, a leading opponent of apartheid who headed the campaign to have South Africa expelled from the Olympic Games, has won his fight against deportation from the United States. A judge in Chicago granted him political asylum..."
• Among the Magazines: Index

  "Other articles in the June issue, which is devoted to Africa and Argentina, include... 'Sculptor in prison', an interview with Pitika Ntuli, the black South African poet and artist, who describes how he coped with the ordeal of solitary confinement in Swaziland.
• African Adventurer: The life of a Nigerian maverick makes for a challenging read

  Politically engage young writers are supposed to mellow when they grow old. With experience and recognition, you somehow expect them to become more settled in their chosen craft, less fired-up, more removed from the fray. But not Wole Soyinka. Twenty years after winning the Nobel Prize for literature, the first African to do so, he has pitched himself back into the seething politics of Nigeria, "the place I never should have left". [David White reviews Wole Soyinka's autobiographical work.]
• Where authors take the stage

  "This year there were 82 of us invited from 26 countries."
• Critics' choice

  "Bookmark: The Poet, the President, and the Travelling Players (BBC2, 8:10pm) The poet is Jack Mapanje, exiled from Malawi, living in New York."
• Friday 12 November

  "4.05. Kaleidoscope. Tim Marlow visits an exhibition of Richard Wentworth's work and rounds up the important events of the week: studio guest is poet, Jack Mapanje."