Items

• Women out the classics in the academe's war of words

  "Top 12 Modern Novelists"
• University news

  The Chancellor of Oxford university, Mr. Harold Macmillan, presided over a congregation yesterday when the degree of Doctor of Letters by Diploma was conferred onto Mr. Leopold Sedar Senghor, president of the Republic of Senegal. Degrees by diploma are conferred only on members of the Royal Family, heads of state and chancellors of the university. President Senghor, a poet and philosophic writer and honorary fellow of St. Antony's College, is the second head of an African state to receive such a degree. The Boden Sanskrit Prize has been awarded to S. P. M. Mackenzie, University College.
• South African wins Booker prize

  The Booker McConnell prize for fiction was awarded last night to J. M. Coetzee for Life and Times of Michael K, published by Secker and Warburg... Mr Coetzee wins the prize of 10,000 and considerable prestige for his political novel about South Africa... Mr Coetzee was born in Cape Town in 1940 and educated in South Africa and the United States. Trained as a computer scientist and linguist, he teaches linguistics and American literature at the University of Cape Town.
• 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..."
• S. A. Professor Resigns

  Mr. Adam Small, one of South Africa's leading Coloured intellectuals, has resigned his teaching post at the troubled University of the Western Cape, citing the enforced closure of the Coloured institution as one of his reasons. The University has been closed since June 11 following student demonstrations against alleged restrictive rules and White domination in running the institution.
• Police hold playwright

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright and head of the drama department at Ibadan University, has been detained by the federal Government for security reasons. He was arrested after being interrogated by the federal police. Doctors, including Soyinka's personal physician, are quoted as reporting that he was not manhandled by the Nigerian police, as alleged by some foreign newspapers. His wife was allowed to visit him last Friday. News of other writers in the former Eastern Nigeria is obscure, although it is known that the poet Christopher Okigbo, the representative of Cambridge University Press here, was killed in action as an army major. Mr. Soyinka was reported in The Times last week to have been released by the federal authorities after his detention on August 17. Reports reaching London said that he was seriously ill. His arrest on that occasion followed the publication in Nigeria of a letter in which he urged the federal Government to call a truce on hostilities with the secessionist Eastern Region. Mr. Soyinka, who was educated at Leeds University, is the best-known poet, playwright, and novelist in Nigeria. Among his plays performed in Britain are, The Road, The Trials of Brother Jero, and The Lion and the Jewel.
• Picture Gallery

  [Photo with caption] Two writers involved in politics wait to receive honorary degrees at Harvard University: Alan Paton, novelist and leader of the South African Liberal Party, chats with Leopold Sedar Senghor, poet and President of Senegal.
• Nigerian play for Court Theatre

  Wole Soyinka, a young Nigerian writer who was educated at Leeds University and was a member of the Royal Court Theatre group of writers, is to have his comedy The Lion and the Jewel produced at the Royal Court Theatre on December 8. It will be his second play for the Court, the other was The Invention, which Mr. Soyinka directed in 1959. He has since returned to Nigeria, where he runs two theatre companies. The Lion and the Jewel is a comedy with music and dancing directed by Desmond O'Donovan and designed by Jocelyn Herbert. This will be Jocelyn Herbert's first week for the stage since A Patriot For Me in 1965. The production will be in conjunction with the Tjinle Players, a group of African actors living in London and is particularly appropriate it is said for the Christmas holidays for older children as well as adults. Heading the cast of 21 are Hannah Bright-Taylor as Sidi, the Jewel of Ilujinle, Jomoke Debayo as Sadiku the chief wife, Willie Payne as the Bale of Ilujinle and Femi Euba as Lakunle the schoolteacher.
• News in Brief: Nigerian writer loses passport

  The passport of Mr. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, was impounded by security officials at Ikeja airport yesterday, The Sunday Times reported today. Mr. Soyinka, who is head of the school of drama at Ibadan University, was going to Paris to take part in the play Murderous Angels by Dr. Cruise O'Brien, the former head of the United Nations mission in the Congo.
• N. P. Vanwyk Louw

  Nicholaas Petrus VanWyk Louw, one of South Africa's best known Afrikaans poets, died on Wednesday night. He was 64. Apart from his own work he was known for his studies on Afrikaans of such contemporary poets as T. S. Eliot. In 1943 Louw was awarded the Hertzog prize for Literature by the South African Academy of Arts and Sciences. Holland's University of Utrecht awrded him an honorary degree of a doctor in literature in 1948. Louw was the founder in 1930 of STANDPUNTE, the South African literary review. Louw was for many years lecturer in education at the University of Cape Town and later was appointed to the Chair of Afrikaans and Nederlands at the University of the Witwatersrand.
• Mr. Wole Soyinka Acquitted

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright and university lecturer, who has been standing trial at Ibadan on a charge of robbery with violence, was acquitted today. Mr. Justice Kayode Eso said there was a material conflict in the evidence of the prosecution witnesses. He was, however, convinced that the incident complained of in the charge really took place. Last October a gunman entered a Radio Nigeria studio in Ibadan, capital of western Nigeria, and attempted to replace the tape of a message from Chief Akintola, the Prime Minister, with his own. Mr. Soyinka said he was not in Ibadan at the time.
• Literature: In Brief

  Excerpt: "The Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo explores the psychological confusion of being an immigrant in a country that has colonized her homeland. In Aidoo's semi-autobiographical novel Our Sister Killjoy (1977), Sissie, on arriving in London, is surprised by how many black citizens she finds -- and by how "wretched" they seem. Those who held university degrees in their own country had formed the underclass of the British economy..."
• 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.
• 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."
• Coloured academics refuse to take part in 'witch-hunt'

  Three coloured academics have resigned from an otherwise all-white committee investigating readmissions to the Universty of the Western Cape, which was closed last week after student disturbances. The three, Mr. Adam Small, head of the university's philosophy department, Mr. G. J. Gerwel, lecturer in Afrikaans, and Mr. C. T. Johnson, lecturer in botany, had been named by Dr. Shalk van der Merwe, the Minister of Coloured Affairs, to serve on the committee with 10 white academics. A spokesman for their staff association said last night that they had resigned because the minister had already said that some students would not be readmitted and they did not want to take part in a witch-hunt.
• Charges of Forming Illegal W. Nigeria Government: Police Seek Poet

  Following a clash between police and undergraduates at Ibadan University, all students there have been restricted to the campus. They were demonstrating against the outcome of the regional elections. In Lagos market women were dispersed by police with tear gas while on a protest march to the Prime Minister's residence from Mushin, which is the Western Nigerian suburb of the Federal capital. Police in Ibadan toda declared Mr. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and poet who featured in the recent Commonwealth arts festival in Britain, to be a wanted person. They have asked for public cooperation in finding Mr. Soyinka, in connexion with an incident which prevented a message from Mr. Akintola, the regional Premier, being broadcast. It was stated that the recorded message was seized in the studio by an armed man, who took it away. The regional Governor has reappointed Chief Babatunji Oloweku Justice Minister and Attorney General. This is the first portfolio to be allocated so far. Chief Remifani Kayode, Chief Claude Akran, and Chief Adebiyi Adeyi have been reappointed ministers.
• 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."
• Senegal

  "The President, Leopold Senghor, is a distinguished poet who spends his leisure hours translating Gerald Manley Hopkins into French."
• The French, the Negroes and the Arabs

  "Lecturing at Oxford on Thursday, President Leopold Senghor of Senegal expounded, and indeed exemplified, a view of the African personality unfamiliar to a British audience."
• English for Others

  Sir, in view of your leader of October 18 and the correspondence stimulated by it, we think some leaders would be interested in the nature and scope of a first-year university course in English Language and literature...