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• 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 There are at least four novelists of interest: Achebe, Ekwensi, Nzekwu and Babatunde Jones (the last unpublished); there are lively poets: Okara, Soyinka, Clark and Okigbo--the first two represented on the previous page.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." ...
• 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."
• 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..."
• 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."
• Unfettered, Unfree

  [Gerald Moore reviews 'Song of Lawino']: "Out of the grasslands of Northern Uganda comes a new voice in African poetry. It is a voice whose innate sophistication is controlled by compassion and understanding, so that the poet can quite simply lend it to an illiterate woman whose circle might otherwise be confined to the village well and the dancing arena... Mr. Okot's poem was originally composed in Lwo, the language of the Acoli people. Much of its imagery is rooted in their traditional songs of love, war, victory, and death. In rewriting his poem in English he has chosen a strong, simple idiom which preserves the sharpness and frankness of this imagery, a structure of short, free verses which flow swiftly and easily, and an uncondescending offer of all that is local and specific in the original... Inevitably lost is the pattern of rhyme, assonance and tonal variation offered by the vernacular. In the poet's own words, he has 'clipped a bit of the eagle's wings'. But what survives is enough to offer one of the most varied and exciting contributions yet made to English poetry in Africa."
• Tradition Gone Stale-

  Ulli Beier critiques the collection of Swahili poetry. He suggests that we should be grateful for the collection, in that "very little is known about African poetry anywhere on our continent," but he also argues that this collection suffers from translation and the fact that the Swahili poetry is meant to be sung or recited to music. He concludes that the poetry in the volume is worth more to "students of East African ethnolography and above all to Islamic scholars," but not to literary critics.
• Tracts for the times: Art, Dialogue and Outrage by Wole Soyinka

  Andrew St. George reviews Wole Soyinka's essay collection, suggesting, "Soyinka sparkles and delights. He carries his credentials lightly but likes the sound they make when they drop...But criticism for Soyinka travels both ways down a broad street; these essays foster a taste for the inordinate and mischievous which works with and against Nigerian culture."
• Through the Drum

  [Excerpt]: "A comparison of two recent critical studies of African fiction raises the whole question of whether its effective criticism demands the isolation of an appropriate aesthetic, distinct from that assumed in teh study of the European or American novel. Any reader turning first to Eustace Palmer, as being the African in this brace of critics, is likely to be disappointed in his search for special illumination.... The collection of recorded interviews with various authors assembled in African Writers Talking derives its value from the fact that most of the writers have been interviewed several times, over a period of some years, and by different interlocutors. The result is a considerable illumination of the developing consciouness in men like Achebe, Okigbo, Awoonor, Ngugi, and Soyinka; consciousness about their own work, the nature of the art in which they work, and the degree of their obligation to be quite consciously teachers, stimulators and even admonishers of their societies...."
• Then and Now: A Change of Address

  [A reprint of Robert Potts's review of Speech! Speech! by Geoffrey Hill.] "...The writers Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo, variously alluded to, both worked for Nigerian radio before the Biafran conflict, sinister and exemplary details of which are found throughout Speech! Speech! ..."
• The World of Books

  Desmond MacCarthy praises and reviews Roy Campbell's newest volume of poems, "Adamastor." MacCarthy writes that: "It is seldom that the critic has the privilege of assisting at the birth of a book destined to a long life, and he may well be embarrassed. I have no doubt at all that this one which has fallen into my hands is destined to be famous."
• The Primacy of the Performer

  Book reviews by Geoffrey Axworthy. He critiques three books: "African Theatre Today" by Martin Banham, "The Drama of Black Africa" by Anthony Graham-White, and "African Literature Today" by Eldred Durosimi Jones. Excerpt: "'African Theatre Today' is a well-organized and thoroughly readable introduction to the works of the principal published dramatists of West and East Africa, with a concise account of their cultural and theatrical backgrounds. Extensive quotations from the plays, clearly related to context, and the attractive format of the book, make it a pleasure to read... This quality is unfortunately lacking in Anthony Graham-White's 'The Drama of Black Africa.' ... One important point that all three books tend to obscure (for instance, through book lists giving dates of publication rather than composition) is that the flow of dramatic writings of high literary quality in English has dried to a trickle in the past decade. One of the reasons for this is undoubtedly political disillusionment, the ebbing of the powerful romantic and idealistic forces that produced an astonishing flood of creativity in the period just before and just after independence..."
• The music of Milan

  [A review of Italian poet Vittorio Sereni's collections]...The first part of Sereni's masterpiece, "Un posto di vacanza" contains two snatches of quotation in italics. While his few notes for Stella variabile (1981) had indicated that the second is from his translation of "Ton Oeuvre" by the Malagasay poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, he had seen no need to point out that the first was of lines from an epigram by Fortini, "Sereni esile mito" (Sereni slender myth), which had cited his own war poem "Italiano in Grecia" to criticize its "perplessa musica" and attack his belief in youth: "Non sempre giovinezza e verita", Fortini writes (Youth is not always truth).
• The Lyrics of the President

  "This appears to be the first book-length study of President Senghor's poetry available in English. That fact alone is surprising, when one reflects that the past few years have seen the appearance of studies of Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka (three), Mongo Beti, and Peter Abrahams...Nevertheless, his book has the important merits of being pleasant to read, freshly written, free from any thesis-like fussiness and innocent of obscurity."
• The Climate of Taste

  G. S. Fraser reviews the new anthology, The Faber Book of Modern Verse, which is intended to complement the previous version, the Faber Book of Modern Verse, collected by Michael Roberts. This new anthology was edited by two poets, John Heath-Stubbs and David Wright. Of David Wright, Fraser says: "...readers of anthologies, however, will have enjoyed both his poems on classical themes and his comic and satirical pieces, which have something of the robustness of similar work by his fellow-countryman, Mr. Roy Campbell."
• Spring Announcements

  The short announcement mentions the release of Francis Cary [sic] Slater's new collection of poetry, "Dark Folk and Other Poems," along with a few other works also being published by Blackwoods.
• Specialist issues: Literature

  [A review of Research in African Literatures, volume 18.] It may be that there are "already too many little magazines and academic journals in existence, more than any of us can read or subscribe to, even in our own disciplines". This is how Sheila Roberts opens a review of a new English-language journal from an Afrikaans university in the spring 1987 issue of Research in African Literatures. The new journal sounds all too supernumerary, indeed. But where else might such a publication be knowledgeably noticed? More important, where else would such a notice be found jostled by reviews of Volume Four of the Unesco General History of Africa, Spracher, Geschichte und Kultur in Afrika (papers of the third conference of African linguists held in Cologne in October 1982) and Monica Wanambisi's Thought and Technique in the Poetry of Okot p'Bitek (1984)? These are only five of the twenty-five reviews which--as is usual in this journal--make up close on half the contents...
• South African Poet

  "This volume gathers examples from the best work of one of the foremost South African poets of today. The quality that strikes one particularly in Mr. Slater's verse is its ability to achieve a quiet subtlety of rhythm: it flows with a varied cadence, without monotony, carefully preventing its metre from stamping, or its rhyme from rinigng, to the disturbance of its subdued harmonies. Its content is chiefly remarkable for its sensitive feeling for the African landscape. Mr. R. C. K. Ensor's brief biographical note of the poet which introduces the book is most useful."
• South African Bard

  The critic reviews Francis Carey Slater's new poetry collection. Of Slater's last collection, the critic writes "The history of his literary achievements, which grew from apparently unpromising circumstances, deepened the interest of the book; the honesty of the writing was evident in the varied quality of the poems. Some of them were old fashioned and derivative...but there were thers of special power." For this new collection, the critic suggests that Slater's "poetic character is complex; the romantic, the stoic and the satiric unite in it."
• Sounding the Sixties--2: The Commonwealth

  Derwent May considers the state of the Commonwealth, mostly through its production of literature: "The emergence of an African literature in English is undoubtedly the most extraordinary and significant development of the past five years...He has, however, been followed by other more discplined and less extravagent writers, of whom Mr. Chinua Achebe is unquestionably the chief; and other countries besides Mr. Tutuola's native Nigeria have made their contributions, the latest being Kenya, in the person of Mr. James Ngugi. Everyone is now conscious of the African writer; in poetry but especially in prose... Wonderful Africa has replaced the West Indies as the centre of interest."
• Songs from the grasslands

  Gerald Moore praises Okot p'Bitek's collection of Acoli traditional songs. He suggests that the songs and poems collected here have merit on their own accord, rather than to be used as only ethnographic material "to be eviscerated." Of Okot p'Bitek himself, Moore writes, "Those familiar with his own poetry, especially The Song of Lawino, will recognize here the indigenous poetic tradition in which that fine work is embedded. The bitters of Lawino's sense of betrayal is not a personal but a cultural bitterness."
• Sheer ingenuity of Soyinka's plot

  Royal Court Theatre: The Lion and the Jewel by Wole Soyinka. This is the third play by Wole Soyinka to appear in London since last year, and this work alone is enough to establish Nigeria as the most fertile new source of English-speaking drama since Synge's discovery of the Western Isles. Even this comparison does Soyinka less than justice, for he is dealing not only with a rich folk material, but with the impact of the modern world on tribal custom: to find any parallel for his work in English drama you have to go back to the Elizabethans...It is tempting to linger over the sheer ingenuity of Soyinka's plot. But what comes over even more strongly in Desmond O'Donovan's production is his originality of scene construction (a sparring match in proverbs, reflected in a simultaneous wrestling bout), and the richly expressive range of speech idioms...
• Senegal's shining beacon

  Roland Oliver reviews Janet G. Vaillant's biography of Leopold Senghor. The book is "directed far more towards Senghor's contribution as a poet and thinker than to his career as a politician and statesman" which "makes agreeable reading."
• Revving up

  Terry Eagleton writes on Christopher Hope, a white South African poet. Of his poetry, Eagleton says, "Mr. Hope's poems do not easily yield sympathy to their subjects... It seems rather the necessary stringency of a poet who needs to feel his way back into an increasingly alien world by a process of precise observation, clarifying and defining its textures so that perception itself becomes a kind of moral act."
• Remainders

  I've always had a soft spot for Madagascar, if only because the people are called Malgache, which sounds as if it ought to mean a soft spot ("I was abseiling down the bergschrund when I dropped my karabiners into a malgache"), and because of the soft musicality of their language. "Tsaroako ny tsikin'ny androko omaly/Izay manjary aloka foana, indrisy!" sings J. J. Rabearivelo in Love Song, which may be rendered (courtesty K. Katzner, Languages of the World, Routledge and Kegan Paul) "I recall the joys of days gone by / They waned alas to flit away!" But when I read that an armoured division of the Malagasy Army had been called in to destroy the dojo of an intransigent karate sect which had been terrorizing peaceable tourists (or, according to others, brutally to extirpate the only democratic opposition) I thought it was time to be better informed...