Items

• 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 allusive traditions of Africa

  Book review of Ruth Finnegan's work; briefly mentions of p'Bitek: "Clearly, we shall have to move not only towards the acceptance of aesthetic standards in the collection of [African] oral literature but towards the acceptance of two partially separate standards. For the indigenous collector, like Okot p"Bitek of the Acoli or J. H. Nketia of the Adan, a standard based on deep and intimate knowledge of the particular culture and its chief literary artists must be adopted."
• Stranger's Voice

  Hugo Young interviews Oswald Mtshali on his poetry collection, "Sounds of a Cowhide Drum," which sold over 16,000 copies. Young writes that Mtshali is "the poet of oppression--humorous, often bitter-sweet, rarely vengeful but still a unique chronicler of apartheid from the black underside of it."
• 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..."
• Scorning the Sonnet

  Carlin writes of Goodwin's collection: "The strength of the book is not Ken Goodwin's criticism...but the arrangement and explication of these ten poets according to a scheme which forms a socio-cultural description of African poetry. In this respect, Professor Goodwin is enlightening and instructive, for he places his poets... roughly in the order of their Africanness, their independence of European models."
• 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."
• From veld-lovers to freedom fighters

  Lewis Nkosi reviews the collection of poetry by Guy Butler and Chris Mann. The collection features a multitude of African poets, and has been translated into English for those poets whose language is "Afrikaans." This tension is explored by Nkosi, who suggests, "From the very beginning, English-speaking South Africans have struggled, sometimes fiercely, to forge a new identity out of this double sense of belonging." Nkosi then mentions poets such as Kunene, Mtsbali, Serote, Gwala, and Sepamla as "gathered into this poetic enclosure like Zimbabwean freedom fighters brought to makeshift assembly points."
• Commentary

  [Excerpt]: "The new African writing has come a long way since the early 1950s when its preoccupations reached publication under titles as Elizabeth's passion and How to write love letters. Authors even then were not shy to take liberties with the English language... Anglophone Africa had to wait ten years before it could begin to read these books in translation and it is still waiting for the Mongo Beti novel, which is currently being translated by Gerald Moore and will then join the other two in the African Writers Series of Heinemann Educational Books. General editor of this series which, including forthcoming books, extends to some 73 titles, is the Ibo, Chinua Achebe, whose first novel, Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, is a classic of modern African writing which has become well known through translations into many languages...[Achebe] identifies himself wholeheartedly with the Biafran cause and he and two other gifted young writers, Cyprian Ekwensi and Gabriel Okara, have undertaken highly paid lecture tours in the United States to raise funds for their country. Achebe's publisher asked him while he was in London not so long ago whether he was in fact here on diplomatic business. "No," he replied, "on sedition."
• Agisymbolic

  The review entitled Agisymbolic is critical of Janheinz Jahn collection of works; the "heterogenous material" included in his book varies from "Juan Latino, who wrote bad poems in Latin in praise of Spanish noblemen; Langston Hughes pleading for sympathy; Somali poets imitating Arabic ideas of chivalry," and so on. The critic is skeptical of Jahn's suggestion that all of "the black African cultures south of the Sahara form a cultural unit" and that they can be collectively called Agisymbia. Jahn defines neo-African literature all writing that contains Agisymbian-style elements, but never truly explains what an "Agisymbian" element includes.
• 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 garbled message

  Watson compares the two anthologies of African poetry, one compiled by Stephen Gray and the other Jane Watts. Of Penguin's anthology, he writes, "No work to date so completely misrepresents the full spectrum of poetry from this part of the world, and seems so perversely designed to mislead readers who do not already have extensive independent knowledge of local political and cultural history... Gray claims that all nations of southern African belong to a single 'literary system' whose importance overrides any division of the area into separate nation-states." Of Watts, Watson has a more positive opinion, in that Watts instead makes the "essential point" that the work of black writers in South Africa is "very different from that of African writers elsewhere." He then writes that, "having presented these differences, [Jane Watts] is able to explain with admirable lucidity why black writing in this country has progressively assumed an identity all its own, and most particularly why it no longer conforms to Western aesthetic standards."