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• 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."
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• News in Brief: Nigerian Author on Hunger Strike

  Mr. Wole Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright and university lecturer, has gone on hunger strike after being held by the police at Ibadan for nearly a week, his lawyer said today. Mr. Soyinka, whose play The Road was staged at the recent Commonwealth Arts Festival in London, gave himself up last Tuesday. A warrant had been issued for his arrest, and the police said they wanted to question him about an illicit broadcast from Ibadan.
• 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.
• More arrested in South Africa

  Cape Town, Sept 16 -- At least four whites and an African have been detained under the Terrorism Act, in a new wave of arrests by South African security police. The latest arrests are connected with the detention some weeks ago of Breyten Breytenbach, an Afrikaner poet, James Polley, a Cape Town University lecturer, and a number of student leaders.
• London Diary

  President Senghor of Senegal, who left London yesterday after a conspicuously successful five-day official visit, had a lively discussion on English and French literature with the Queen at a luncheon party in his honour. Both agreed that State duties made it difficult to devote as much time to reading as they would wish. The President said he insisted on spending from 9 to 11 each morning at his books. M. Senghor, an outstanding French poet, is an admirer of Stephen Spender and Dylan Thomas and has translated both into French. He would like to do the same with T. S. Eliot but finds him "too difficult for translation." He hopes the British Council will send poets and writers on lecture tours of Senegal. President Senghor was captured while fighting with the French Resistance. A brilliant linguist, he became the prison camp's interpreter.
• 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.