Items

• 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."
• 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."
• Uprooting the malignat fictions

  [Excerpt]: "The critical work represented in the selected essays of the South African novelist J. M. Coetzee and the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe is of a new and superior order, mobilizing the best creative and criticla energies of two writers as committed to their craft as they are to exposing what Achebe calls the 'monster of racist habit.' In both cases the critique of a 'white' culture (whether European, American, or South African)--its assu,ptions, blind spots, abuses of language, logic or humanity--is based on a scrupulous examination of evidence, as it emerges within early travel writing, anecdotes, or the work of individual authors who appear to be transmittig the 'truth' of a continent and its indigenous peoples, but are often perpetuating Western conceptual grids... [Achebe's] collection begins with his analysis of Conrad and ends with a tribute to James Baldwin. Along the way there are speeches on broad topics, such as 'The Truth of Fiction' and 'Thoughts on the African Novel,' a personal tribute to Christopher Okigbo, and passing reflections on the present needs of his own society..."
• 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."
• Stirring a sense of common purpose

  "The interdependence of academia and creative writing was the theme of this year's four-day annual International PEN Conference, which drew about 150 members from forty-five PEN Centres to Cambridge... Geoffrey Haresnape, a South African poet and professor at the University of Cape Town, gave a more heartening description of the attempts of English-Language universities in South Africa (whose existence depends on financial subsidy from the State) to move beyond a colonialist cultural stance, for example by including indigenous writing on their courses."
• 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."
• Seventy-five years on

  "[This study] by Professor Cory, of the Rhodes University College, Grahamstown, approaches more nearly to a high standard of historical writing than any book we have yet seen on South African history...After a brief sketch of the origin of the Dutch settlement at the Cape this volume, the first of four contemplated, is almost entirely concerned with the fortunes of the eastern province... There is, however, one curious ommission. Thomas Pringle, the only South African poet known to the outside world, is but twice mentioned, and on both occasions in a manner depreciatory of his testimony with regard to controversial matters. Pringle undoubtedly after his return to Cape Town took a bitter view of all dealings of South Africans with the natives, and he may have been as wrong-headed as Professor Cory represents him; but at any rate his experiences as one of the earliest settlers on the Baviaans River and his enthusastic poems on the life he and his companions led should have awakened a sympathetic chord in so great a lover of the eastern province as Professor Cory..."
• Reclaiming the mother tongue

  [Chinweizu reviews "Decolonizing the Mind," a book by Ngugi wa Thiong'o.] "...Even in colonial days, Africans wrote literary works in African langauges. But such works have always remained outside the maistream of official culture. Among Africa's post-independence writers, several others preceded Ngugi in writing in their mother tongues. The best known of these was the late Okot p'Bitek whose works, including his famous Song of Lawino, were composed in Acholi, and then translated by him into English."
• Poet of Senegal

  Gerald Moore reviews two selections of Senghor's work; one with an introductory essay from Armand Guibert, wherein "he offers a good deal of material on the poet's origins and the formation of his style" followed by a collection of his work; and the second as Senghor's first new book of poetry for five years, which Moore calls "a disappointment." Moore ends the review by suggesting that "Africa has moved into a new era...of more direct self-expression free from obsessive reactions against assimilation, colonialism, and so forth" and that Senghor has "failed to make a new exploration of experience and his poetry has lost some of its relevance."
• Oversea Poetry

  "At a meeting of the Royal Colonial Institute, yesterday Sir Charles Lucas in the chair, Sir Herbert Warren read a paper on Overseas Poetry... South Africa had a Kipling in Cullen Gouldsbury, who died at Tanga in August, 1916-- [poem excerpt]... So sang of him another very different South African poet, the Rev. Arthur Shearley Cripps, who was as if Livingstone were fused with Keble in a strange dual personality, and writing of Kipling and Rhodes."
• New Books and Reprints: Poetry

  "Poems of fine spirit and texture, carried through with the lilt of ballad metre, describing the fight with the submarine, the sensations of flight, and the adventures and heroism of airmen. Mr Vine Hall is a South African poet and some portions of these poems have appeared in South African periodicals."
• Literature as Symptom

  [Excerpt]: "It is not only the Russians whose literature, as last week's front-page article argued, is liable to be dissected for its bearing on social and political conditions. To a certain extent this happens anywhere--the Russians themselves, for instance, often do the same thing for that of capitalist countries, sometimes with very misleading results--and it is a useful enough pastieme so long as it is not allowed to determine aesthetic judgments...Even then, if white writers are excluded from consideration, as they tacitly were throughout the conference, the basis for any kind of critical generalization is still slight. Perhaps that is why both Mr. Donatus Nwoga's paper on the short story and Mr. Mphahlele's own on the novel consisted largely of lengthy quotations from a handful of writers. Even Mr. Ulli Beier, of Ibadan, who is the outstanding critic in this field, confined himself virutally to the writings of the Nigerians Christopher Okigbo and J. P. Clark and the South African poet Dennis Brutus, saying that he had not seen more than six or seven poems by such other promising writers as Wole Soyinka and Gabriel Okara. We are certainly far from being able to speak of African literature as a whole..."
• How do you pull of something like this? Director Rufus Norris talks to Sarah Hemming about the challenge of staging a play by Wole Soyinka

  Sarah Hemming interviews director Rufus Norris about the process of putting on Death and the King's Horseman, by Wole Soyinka. Of the play: "Considered by many to be Wole Soyinka's greatest play, this 1975 drama is based on a real incident in Oyo, Nigeria, in 1946, when the colonial district officer intervened to prevent a local man committing ritual suicide. Soyinka's drama places that man, Elesin, at the centre of the story and follows the disastrous conseqeunces of his being unable to complete the rite."
• Global locals

  Christopher Coker's review of Chris Patten's book, What Next?, which is a book on the aftermath of the Iraq War, drops the name of South African poet Breyten Breytenbach: "Steyn's criticism can be taken with a pinch of salt. Canada, remarked the South African poet Breyten Breytenbach, 'is all accent, and no master text'. It is everything America isn't. There is no Manifest Destiny, no Dream and no Creed. This must pain Canadian neoconservatives. They have to buy into the master text of other countries."
• From Slad to Spain and back

  "It is, after all, an extraordinary story. Everyone knows how the boy from Slad, Gloucestershire, not yet twenty, walked out one mid-summer morning armed with nothing much but a fiddle, a tent and his downy good looks... Playing his fiddle in the main square of Toledo, he attracted the attention of Roy Campbell, the South African poet, who invited him to stay. Campbell was married to Mary, one of the fabled German sisters, bohemian upper-class beauties, and Laurie was photographed with her five-year-old niece Kathy (daugther of another German sister) on his knee. A decade and a half later, Kathy married him, and with their daughter Jesse, loked after him for the rest of his life."
• Elite Performances

  Excerpt: "One of the themes in The Development of African Drama is that those who would preserve the traditional culture of Africa are actually destroying it, encouraging the desire to perfect the arts of performance, but at the cost of losing touch with the community which alone gives them meaning and value...Etherton offers a lengthy series of accounts of the conditions which have led up to and which surround the production and performance or publication of a wide range of plays from various parts of (mainly Anglophone) Africa. The plays are categorized according to the issues which his overall approach suggests--the survival of the orally transmitted theatre; the growth of "literary" or "art" theatre, and the institutions which promote it; the relationship between written texts and performance; "protest" theatre; and so on. There is a detailed discussion of the work of individual playwrights such as Soyinka, Ngugi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Rotimi, Ebrahim Hussein..."
• Dominion Poets

  E. Wilmot criticizes the reviewer of "Dominion Poets" featured on February 26th; Wilmot suggests that the reviewer is "ignorant" of South African poetry due to his Englishness. Wilmot writes: "I confess myself disheartened by the argument that so long as I remain a South African - a "colonial," as my sophisticated uncles and aunts were in the habit of saying - I cannot become a poet; and that when I achieve poethood, I shall no longer be a South African."
• Black Orpheus

  Thorpe reviews Ulli Beier's anthology of African Poetry, which includes fifty-four poems translated from twenty-six languages. The collection purports to be for students in Africa to study English poetry, but Thorpe is critical of the anthology's lack of inclusion of poems in the African version, as well. He writes, "Offering them only an English text half concedes - with unintentional irony - the defeat of the languages many are being educated away from."
• Black man's burden

  [Niven reviews Towards the Decolonization of African Literature] "Toward the Decolonization of African Literature is dedicated to thirty-three Third World intellectuals, "expemplary inciters against toleration of our oppressed condition... The main accusation levelled here is that European critics have attempted to annex African literature for themselves. If a book is written in English or French then it is seen as a by-product or subdivision of the Great Tradition, of Modernism, or of some other beautified cultural monolith... They defend African orature against its alleged deficiencies in characterization and range of expression, and witheringly expose the pretensions of European critics who half get the point and so miss it by miles--in, for example, comparing the brevity of many African novels with oral tales... Toward the Decolonization of African Literature is not a pioneer study but it articulates a point of view which is increasingly heard among African critics and which has not previously been marshalled with so much damning quotation. It restores to literary criticism a brio, verging at times on insult, which is rare in Western criticism, where so often genteel irony or theoretical contortions are substituted for plain-spoken assertion of a fully held point of view. Also, the book is fundamentally right..."
• 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."
• Attempting the Pen

  Angela Leighton reviews three anthologies: "Anthology of British Women Writers," "Longman Anthology of World Literature by Women," and "Dictionary of British Women Writers." Excerpt: "Anthologies serve many purposes. They may blaze a trail of new writing, or simply confirm popular tastes of the day. They may change the literary consciousness of an age, or merely look good on the coffee table... A short story by the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo is followed by two poems by the Cuban Cuza Male, and three very funny poems on women and colonialism by the Jamaican Louise Bennett are followed by Doris Lessing's sophisticated satire of male sexism in a short story called 'A Woman on a Roof.' ..."
• At the crossroads of cultures

  [Excerpt]: Nadine Gorimer reviews Chinua Achebe's collection of essays Morning Yet on Creation Day. "Named by Christianized parents after Queen Victoria's beloved; master of the colonial master's tongue, splendidly appropriating it to interpret his country's and people's past; bold user of freedom won by Africa against white domination; Albert Chinualumogu became Chinua Achebe is himself the definitive African experience... Alternatively, there are writers who regard the category "African writer" (with its concomitant, African critic?) as a patronizing relegation to literary provincialism. Achebe quotes Nigeria's finest poet, Christopher Okigbo: "There is no African literature. There is good writing and bad writing--that's all." ..."
• African Poems of Thomas Pringle

  Stephen Watson reviews the poetry collection of Thomas Pringle, who is a Scottish poet considered to be the "father of South African poetry": "On the face of it, the title might seem well-deserved. He was undoubtedly the first of the nineteenth-century colonial poets to take on the general conditions of life in the Colony as his subject matter. Moreover, his poetry's early, often outraged protests against white tyranny, as well as its championing of the dispossessed and maligned black peoples, have made him the obvious founding father of that tradition of protest poetry which has been more or less dominant in South Africa in the past few decades." Watson writes of Roy Campbell that Pringle fathered few successors of his kind of poetry, and the only "significant child" was Campbell, who appears a century later.
• African Culture Asserted After Struggle

  "The pre-colonial artistic heritage of Nigeria suffered decay while the country was under British rule. Both Christianity, the religion of the colonial masters, and Islam, which made impressive gains under Pax Britannica, were opposed to manifestations of their converts' ancestral religions, although the latter was more tolerant of them... But the most exciting developments have been in literature, where the late Christopher Okigbo, the poet, Chinua Achebe, a novelist and poet, and Wole Soyinka, poet, playwright, novelist, have proved themselves superb craftsmen who leave the reader in no doubt of their identity, yet handle the English language with the same confidence as the best of their native English-speaking contemporaries."