Items

• Who Won What in 1987

  "As literary prizes proliferate, here is a guide to where the prestige - and the money - went during the year."
• These tarnished Olympics

  [Excerpt]: "If anyone does not believe the repercussions of apartheid stretch far and wide, they should be present at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where it has tarnished the Games as they have never been before. One only had to see last week a departing team from Afria waiting with their baggage for transport to the airport...Everywhere was a feeling of sadness and futility... This was a seminar organised by the United Nations Special Committee Against Apartheid and held in Havana, attended by 200 delegates including the crucial nucleus of leading African sports officials and SAN-ROC. It was at this stage that Dennis Brutus, the president of SAN-ROC, a professor of English in the African Studies Department at the Northwest University of Illinois, threw his own acknowledged ability and experience and that of SAN-ROC unequivocally behind the African protest. Brutus, an exiled coloured South African, who was imprisoned in South Africa as a result of his views on apartheid, was portrayed in oarts of the British and foreign Press last week as a somewhat sinister figure. Yet, it is he who turned to de Broglio in Havana to say: 'If they (the African countries) are prepared to go through all this--which is much more than we would ever ask--who are we to quarrel? We're with them.'"
• Books for a Commonwealth: Publishing locally or from London

  [Excerpt]: "The Commonwealth Education Conference, held in Delhi in January of this year, was the first conference to be held at ministerial level where the provision of books was a main item on the agenda. It was clear throughout that the 'less developed' countries regarded the provision of books in the English language as of the utmost importance... More and more Africans are being appointed as local managers of these [publishing] houses, as for instance Chief Solaru (O.U.P.), Christopher Okigbo (Cambridge) or Chief Fagunwa (Heinemann), all established in Ibadan; also a new publishing house has recently been set up in Lagos... But there is also an increasing amount of high-quality creative writing in English--especially in West Africa, where British publishers have acquired some welcome new authors. Thus Heinemann (in their 'African Writers Series') publish the impressive Chinua Achebe; Cyprian Ekwensi is issued by Hutchinson; while Amos Tutuola is now an established name in Faber and Faber's list..."
• Africa Centre: African Literature, What Shall We Read?

  Full Text of Ad: "African Literature: What Shall We Read? A two day conference at the Commonwealth Institute. Friday 12 - Saturday 13 April 1991. Participants include: Ama Ata Aidoo, Cyprian Ekwensi, Chenjerai Hove, Aminata Slow-Fall. For further details please contact: The Literature Officer, Commonwealth Institute, Kensington High Street, London."
• Inside track

  "A 13-Black nation boycott of the British Commonwealth Games, threatened by Africa's Supreme Council if the Springbok cricket tour goes ahead, has drawn a cool reaction from a sample of Commonwealth nations."
• Radio

  "3:30 Commonwealth Stories. Short Tales by Sefi Atta, Anu Kumar, and Julianne Okot Bitek"
• Theatres

  "Eastern Nigeria Theatre: Scala Theatre "Song of a Goat"--John Pepper Clark"
• Four cities jaunt

  "The first Commonwealth Arts Festival is to begin in September 16."
• Anti-British Deputy Becomes Ghana High Commissioner

  "Mr. Armah, who is 32, is the chairman of the London Commitee of African Organisations, a highly political group which has organised large-scale demostrations in London against American bases in Britain, apartheid, and the arrest and detention of Patrice Lumumba."
• Writers in plea for jailed poet

  "Literary figures from many countries have joined a campaign to free Jack Mapanje, the Malawi poet who has been held incommunicado sicne he was seized by security police on September, 25."
• Crafty Words, Bloody Deeds

  "The police shootings in Capetown and the execution of Benjamin Moloise despite a last minute plea for clemency from Commonwealth leaders, hardened the positions of those urging sanctions."
• Feuding Commonwealth finds unity

  "He was first to condemn the hanging in Nigeria of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight fellow Ogoni human rights activists as 'judicial murder'"
• The Reluctant Beneficiaries

  "As if by British request, the respected Leopold Senghor of Senegal, returning last week from Dakar last week from a French-Speaking African Heads of State conference in Libreville, came out with a statement
• The Future of France in Africa

  "That is the crux of the matter of certain leaders such as M.Leopold may prefer a federal system, while accepting the principles of the "Framework Law" may feel that they should be pressed further, but all agree that the common aim will be more readily achieved through associating with a Franco-African community than by isolation themselves in an absolute independence more apparent than real."
• Heinemann

  R.K. Narayan, Edmund Blunden, Chinua Achebe, Norman Jeffares, Douglas Grant, Eldred Jones and John Mathews are amongst contributors to this symposium, which arose from the Conference on Commonwealth Literature held in Leeds in 1964.
• Commonwealth writers

  The most poignant contribution to last week's Commonwealth Writer's Conference in Edinburgh, part of a larger pre-Festival arts festival there to coincide with the Commonwealth Games, was not any speech or poem or manifesto but the row of empty seats set aside for "absent" friends.
• Unruly hares

  The challenge of this book is to be engaging, stimulating, and very short. Once the choice has been made not to offer a concise chronicle history or brief anatomy of kinds, an arm must be chanced and a focused found.
• Uncommon Wealth

  It is a great question mark hung in the air above the Commonwealth Literature Conference at Leeds last weeks its presence was only recognized as the week went by.
• Old Bottles for the New Wine

  At the last count, assuming that anyone is counting, how many accepted ways of writing English at there? Answer--probably more than the surviving number of individual purists who lift their hands in horror at what they see happening to the language.
• Learning how to write

  No writer has written more tellingly about the vocation of writing than V.S. Naipaul. His career began almost five decades ago; and this new novel, Half of Life, shows us that Naipaul's absorption with how he became a writer remains fresh,
• In Africa: Ex Africa

  The last decade has seen a distinct change in the attitude of developing countries of Africa and Asia towards books--especially educational books. At the first Commonwealth conference in 1959, found no place on the agenda.
• Finding their Voices

  There is a moment when a particular literature comes of age.But we cannot determine for certain what that moment is until we know for certain what language serve as vessel to express that maturity.
• 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...
• Disarmingly armed

  Chinua Achebe, whose novel Anthill of the Savannah (reviewed in the TLS, October 9-15) was shortlisted for this year's Booker Prize, is among fourteen writers, predominantly poets who will take part in the Jubilee Commonwealth Poetry reading...
• Conferring in absentia

  A gathering of writers and scholars from the continent of Africa, anglophone, francophone, and indigenous, ought to be an exciting event. New Directions in African Literature, organized jointly by the Commonwealth Institute and the Africa Centre, brought together thirty-five principals...