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 There are at least four novelists of interest: Achebe, Ekwensi, Nzekwu and Babatunde Jones (the last unpublished); there are lively poets: Okara, Soyinka, Clark and Okigbo--the first two represented on the previous page.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

  The article frames the question of whether or not Africans can be held to the same esteem as Europeans; it suggests that Europeans have tried to assimilate African nations by having African nations adopt British public school systems, by requiring the learning of Latin, by teaching Hume and Ayer, Descartes ad Gilson. "It wears academic dress, or drinks vermouth in cafes...when this elite wants to write poetry, or do scientific research, or run a business, or make political speeches, or philosophise, it is obliged as a rule to use a European language." The article then asks: "How can we make use of European ideas, institutions, and techniques, without becoming their prisoner--without ceasing to be African?"
• Red island roads

  ...You would think that the Malagasy themselves would exist in a waking dream, with lemurs playing about their heads in a distant version of the Peaceable Kingdom. Yet there are no abstract nouns in the central Malagasy language and their greatest poet, Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, killed himself in 1937 because he could not reconcile his nationalism with the French language and culture in which he was obliged to work...
• 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."
• Praise poet in Paris

  Sheila Mason reviews a collection of poetry, translated by Melvin Dixon, of Leopold Sedar Senghor. Mason writes, "From Senegal's indpendence, in 1960, until 1980 when he relinquished the Presidency of his nation, Leopold Sedar Senghor dominated the West African political and cultural scene as Maecenas, political philosopher and literary theorist and, not least, as a practising poet. Since his elevation in retirement to the Academie Francaise in 1983 and his move to Paris, the turmoil of his continent's political fortunes have so dimmed this renown that reappraisals of his writing now seem overdue. Melvin Dixon's English rendition of the definitive body of his poetry will, it is to be hoped, encourage this process." Mason traces the history of the negritude movement and Senghor's involvement. She also criticizes some of the translation by Melvin Dixon, but ultimately praises the collection: "Thus, while inadvertent infelicities occasionally muffle the poetry's African voice, nevertheless Melvin Dixon achieves that rarest of feats in the translation of poetry: he recreates Leopold Senghor in our own tongue, exhibiting with unflagging good faith his universality as a poet of love, of nature, of war and, rarest of modern accomplishments, of praise.
• Power of the Pen in Exile: The Times Profile, Breyten Breytenbach

  This profile of Breyten Breytenbach describes his arrest in South Africa, his subsequent release, and his feelings about the South African regime and Afrikaans as a language more generally. "It was at the age of 36, the height of his literary acclaim, that South Africa's leading Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach was imprisoned for seven years for clandestine activities against the apartheid system."
• Orpheus in Africa

  [Excerpt]: "Both these anthologies have come together largely by chance. Both editors deny, in remarkably similar language, that they started out with the intention of making an anthology. Ulli Beier has drawn his material from the best stories which have appeared over the past five years in the magazine Black Orpheus, of which he has been one of the editors from its inception in 1957.... Cook's collection has an even closer university connexion, being derived from Penpoint, which was founded in 1958-59, the magazine of the English Department of Makerere University College in Kampala, the capital of Uganda...The Black Orpheus collection represents the second generation. In West Africa the use of English is long domesticated and now comes the urge to play with it. There is nothing here by Amos Tutuola, the first of the Nigerians to erupt into the consciousness of the European reading public with his startling word-play and fantastic subjects, but Gabriel Okara from Eastern Nigeria carries the game even further but also the syntax of his native Ijaw..."
• One World in Four Volumes

  [Excerpt]: "Nine years were spent in preparing The Penguin Companion to Literature and a large number of contributors, most of them academics, have been enlisted. The enterprise is undoubtedly worth while: our world is certainly not politically a single world, but culturally it is becoming at least potentially so. In literature, as in music and the visual arts, we feel a need to have some knowledge by report of what we may never know by acquaintance... In the African section of the fourth volume, the late Christopher Okigbo is credited with being 'one of the most exciting poets now writing in Africa,' and some critics might feel that the formative Western influence was Pound rather than Eliot. The poet from Gambia described as 'Leurie Peters' should surely be Lenrie Peters. It is pleasant to find that very fine bilingual writer in Afrikaans and English, Uys Krige, dealt with briefly, but with proper respect, as is the highly civilized and persecuted South African poet, Dennis Brutus. The note on the Nigerian dramatist Wole Soyinka mentions that his most famous play, The Lion and the Jewel, 'presents the impositions of modern civilization as a threat to the African villagers' individuality.' ..."
• Mr Okot p'bitek: Poet and commentator on African culture

  [Excerpt, Obituary] "Mr Okot p'Bitek, Uganda's best known poet and a trenchant commentator upon contemporary culture in Africa, died on July 19. He was born in 1931 at Gulu in Acholiland Uganda, the son of a teacher...As a result his first major English language work, Song of Lawino (1966) blended modern satirical ironies into a verse form approximating to traditional Acholi poetry, a technique achieved by the author translating his own work into English from its vernacular. The related Song of Ocol, followed in 1970, with Song of Prisoner and Song of Malaya jointly winning the 1972 Kenyatta Prize for Literature. Okot's commitment to Acholi poetry and music is partly explained in the Horn of My Love (1974), a miscellany of poems in two languages with accompanying commentary..."
• 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..."
• Literary impact on world scene

  [Excerpt]: "Nigerian literature, as known abroad, has found itself in the forefront of African literature in English. This is partly a result of sheer volume, in that Nigeria with its huge population has more internationally known writers than any other country in independent Africa. It is partly a result of being early in the field, and in many parts of the world African writing was first discovered in the books of Chinua Achebe and Cyprian Ekwensi... Wole Soyinka, novelist and playwright, has published work in Yoruba and in English. Achebe has never felt able to write creatively in Ibo and has written in English. A further point to note about the Ibo group of writers is that although their ethnic origins are Ibo, their experience was often national and before the political crisis so was much of their writing..."
• In the Arms of the Prison

  [Excerpt, Gerald Moore reviews 'Song of Prisoner, Song of Malaya.'] Since his celebrated Song of Lawino some four years ago, great interest has focused upon Okot p'Bitek's success in developing an East African poetic diction in English whose form, imagery, and points of reference are derived entirely from a vernacular original. The first successor to Lawino, Okot's Song of Ocol, was a disappointment, for it savoured too much of a conscientious attempt to give a voice to an essentially dull, pompous, and vindictive husband. But it was interesting to trace Okot's influence in the work of another Acoli writer, Okello Oculi, whose Orphan offered some passages of real bitterness and power...The impact of the second song is weakened by a slight sentimentalizing of the all-knowing, all-suffering harlot; yet here too Okot uses his new poetic language to induce the reader's sympathy to flow into strange places and to illuminate the corners of hidden lives. His songs are certainly one of the most original and important departures in the poetry of Africa today."
• In brief

  [Full Text]: "An international symposium held in Lagos last month addressed the theme of African Literature before and after the 1986 Nobel Prize, which was won by Wole Soyinka; it was meant to celebrate Europe's recognition of that strand of African literature which is written in European languages. Significantly, not one griot or towncrier from the oral tradition had been invited; not one representative of African literatures in African langauges participated. Many participants criticized the Eurocentrism of the Nobel theme. While Gabriel Okara (a Nigerian novelist and poet of the generation which began to publish at the time of independence in the early 1960s) saw the Nobel award as a 'recognition of African literature in the global context'. Zulu Sofola, a Nigerian playwright of the next generation, viewed it with reservations: 'If the award was given to Soyinka as a ticket to enable us to enter into the club of Western writers, then it is not useful to us.' A third interpretation was offered by William Conton, a novelist from Sierra Leone, who thought of it as 'a recognition of an African writer, who writes according to the concept of literary excellence of a group of Europeans.' In his address to the Conference, the Nigerian president, Ibrahim Babangida, stressed the need to preserve African literature in native language as the use of foreign languages tends, he said, to obscure the character of these works. G. G. Darah of Nigeria, citing the example of his researches into the oral literature of the Urhobo, declared that the corpus of the African spoken tradition is vaster than that of Europhone literature, and that its preoccupations are more relevant to the majority of Africans today; the Nigerian poet and polemicist, Chinweizu, argued that the Nobel was irrelevant to African culture: Europhone African literature--barely a century old--should take second place to Afrophone African literature, which is at least 5,000 years old. Eurocentrics attempted to curb the tide of Afrocentrism with vague pleas for cultural 'universalism'; or with claims that a return of the sources of African civilization would be 'naive romanticism' but at the end of the five-day conerence it was clear that the indigenous agenda had won. A resolution honouring Cheikh Anta Diop, whose studies in Egyptology recovered for African heritage the achievements of the Egypt of the pharoahs, was moved from the floor and added to the official communique."
• Harsh comedy on a Lagos beach

  Independent Africa has produced a big crop of novelists, but so far the only dramatist we know anything about is the Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka. But with Soyinka on the scene African drama is a force to be reckoned with. After last year's production of The Road, and now The Trials of Brother Jero, performed by an African company from the Transcription Centre Theatre Workshop, he appears as an extremely sophisticated craftsman working within a rich folk tradition: given the present impoverished state of our own language, his contribution to English-speaking drama could grow into something as important as Sygne's opening up of the Western isles...
• Avant ou a Rebours?

  [Excerpt]: "Is the avant-garde a subject of indifference to artists outside the western world? Is it generally regarded elsewhere as a curious manifestation of western neuroticism or subjectivisim or decadence? The first special number of The Times Literary Supplement on this theme clearly anticipated some such answer and there are many reasons why one might be tempted to give it... There are two spurs which are likely to gaod the non-European writer more and more in the direction of experiment in the coming years. First, the sense of alienation which is apt to pursue him everywhere once he becomes fully aware, in the search for an identity, of what he is not... Secondly, those who are attempting to record in English or in French the lives of people who do not spak them are immediately confronted with the absolute necessity to experiment with langauge. They may attempt to transfer the imagery, the speech-rhythms, or even, as Gabriel Okara of Nigeria has done in one interesting chapter, the actual syntax of vernacular speech. Whatever they do, they cannot evade the problem, for language taken straight from the European novel or stage will ring falser than any experiment..."
• Akamba, Yoruba, Swahili

  [Ulli Beier reviews two books, Thet Content and Form of Yoruba Ijala by S. A. Babalola and Poems from Kenya by Ahmad Nassir bin Juma Bhalo.] "The editors of the Oxford Library of African Literature hope that 'compositions in local languages will make their impact on world literature as those of India and China have done for many years.' It is not likely that this series--nine volumes have so far appeared--will make much impact ont he literary world.... To make African literature come alive in English is a formidable task. But it can be done, as was proved by Ugandan poet Okot p'Bitek, whose brilliant translation of his own original Acholi poem Song of Lawino was reviewed in the TLS of February 16."
• African Exports

  [Excerpt]: "Today the African novelist is established, not only in profusion among O and A level syllabuses within Africa but also in numerous English literature courses in the Western world... Complementing today's easy availability of the work of African authors (Heinemann's excellent 'African Writers Series' has nearly 150 titles to its credit), Evans Brothers have begun publishing a 'Modern African Writers' series... Each volume adopts a similar pattern, with a brief biographical introduction followed by a critical analysis resting on an exploration of the writer's major works. Thus the aim is fulfiled of telling us something about the present state of criticism in African literature as well as about the work of its principal exponents. 'Schools' are rigorously excluded. Short but useful bibliographies (including lists of critical works as well) and indexes (that for the Okigbo volume, compiled by Valerie Chandler, is a model of its kind) compete the books..."
• 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."
• Africa speaks

  [Excerpt]: "In the tourist bazaars of Dar es Salaam the most common form of 'native art' is carved wooden animals--elephants, giraffes, crocodiles in smooth black wood which turns out not to be ebony.... Many of their authors will not have faced the question which their unique position asks them; of those that have, a surprising number will turn out to belong to that amazing generation of Nigerians--it includes Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, Christopher Okigbo--who made their debuts in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, examined in detail in Bruce King's Introduction to Nigerian Literature, a consciousness of their own cultural dilemma proved not an inhibition but a spur. Unlike Tutuola, whose imaginatively translated Yoruba foklore owes its richness as much to mistranslation of Yoruba as to a feeling for the adopted language itself, they are constantly aware of their responsibilites... Those who have picked the clearest path are without doubt the Ibo novelist Chinua Achebe and the Yoruba playwright Wole Soyinka. Soyinka is a poet, in love with words, images and myths, whose plays blend in a unique mixture all the rich formal elements of European drama with the haunting complexities of African ritual. The accomodation here between teh two cultures is complete. Gerald Moore's Wole Soyinka is a useful introduction for the student, but of course there is no substitute for reading or, if possible, seeing Soyinka's marvellous plays..."
• A Plea for Afrikaans

  T. J. Harhoff's book recounts the origins and development of the Afrikaans language in South Africa. Of African poetry, critic du Plessis writes, "Afrikaans has still a long way to go before it realizes all the hopes of its ardent supporters: but it has some poets and one or two prose-writers whose measure would not be diminished by European standards. The language is bold, simple, humorous, vital and vigorous, and is sufficiently flexible for any venturesome and inventive writer who wishes to express many shades of thought." du Plessis then quotes from Harhoff's book, in which Harhoff discusses Roy Campbell.
• A New Look in Writing

  "History has brought together in South Africa two languages so closley related that if one were to try to express their relationship in familiar terms, one could possibly say they are first cousins. Although this relationship right through the nineteenth century and deep into the present was marred by keen and sometimes even bitter rivalry, conditions are now such that in the literary field at least Afrikaans and English not only are a source of mutual inspiration, but to a large degree also complement each other... "
• Lost for Words

  "He spent time studying under the revered Afrikaans poets N. P. van Wyk Louw and Ernst van Heerden. He had close links to Breyten Breytenbach, whom he considers one of the world's greatest poets."