Items

• Voyage Round Soyinka

  In the article, Anthony Curtis discusses Wole Soyinka as a poet and spokesperson. Curtis writes, "[Soyinka] is able to distance himself from these situations and see them with humorous clarify as well as passionate indignation. Here is a major a writer who has faced two parallel disasters, that of being stultified by a shower of token honours in the west, and at home being put into gaol for subversion."
• This Week

  "8-9 INTERVIEW The great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe makes Bryan Appleyard Shiver"
• The language for poets

  Louis Heren interviews Adam Small on life in South Africa under apartheid. Adam Small, a black South African, discusses the way in which people who speak Afrikaans are "the true South Africans," and that "the whites...were obsessed with colour." He describes the limitations his children will face: "You cannot send your children to the best schools you can afford; only the second-or third-rate. They were bogged down in life despite their talents, from the word go."
• 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."
• Poet fights apartheid with his pen

  Mr Breyten Breytenbach, the Afrikaans poet, who arrived here on Sunday after being unexpectedly freed from prison in South Africa, said yesterday that he would not continue his political fight against apartheid. "I realize that I am not a politician," he said in an television interview. "But my whole life is against this type of situation, this type of ideology, in my private and professional life, as a poet and painter." Asking if he would continue his struggle through his poems and paintings, Mr Breytenbach said: "Yes, that will be my way." Mr Breytenbach, aged 44, was released on Thursday after serving seven years of a nine-year sentence on charges of plotting to overthrow the South African Government. At his trial he had admitted actively supporting the banned African National Congress. Looking fit and well, Mr Breytenbach said that he had seven years of poetry written in prison which he hoped to prepare for publication.
• Oxford University Press

  [Excerpt]: "Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Published for the University of Leeds. Appears twice yearly carrying scholarly and critical articles on literature in English written by authors from any part of the world other than the British Isles and the United States..."
• 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."
• In 'The Times' tomorrow

  A new novel by Graham Greene, his first since The Honorary Consul, is to be published in Britain shortly. An extract from The Human Factor, another exploration of the Greene country, will appear in the Saturday review tomorrow. Other articles include Louis Heren on Adam Small, the Afrikaans poet; an interview with Nadine Gorimer; Olga Franklin on cleaning the British Museum, and the monthly review of paperbacks.
• 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."
• This Bad Boy Done Good

  "There is a way to make extreme art without being a rapist."
• Out of Africa

  "Sir Garfield Todd was born in New Zealand in 1908."
• Diary

  "A researcher from the programme recently contacted the Nigerian-born writer, Ben Okri, to arrange an interview about his Booker shortlisted novel The Famished Road."
• A Poet in Motion

  "Writing comes partly out of being wounded by life. It is very rare that people who have lived perfect lives become writers."
• Relative Values

  "Marai Saro-Wiwa, of the Ogoni tribe, was born in Nigeria in 1949."