If she has trouble believing in her argument, she has even greater trouble in preventing that absence of conviction from emerging in her voice. Despite the fact that she is the noted author of, as Mikael says, The House on Eccles Street and other books, despite the fact that her audience is by and large of her generation and ought therefore to share with her a common past, the applause at the end lacks enthusiasm.
For Emmanuel's talk she sits inconspicuously in the back row. They have in the meantime had a good lunch; they are sailing south on what are still placid seas; there is every chance that some of the good folk in the audience – numbering, she would guess, about fifty – are going to nod off. In fact, who knows, she might nod off herself; in which case it would be best to do so unnoticed.
'You will be wondering why I have chosen as my topic the novel in Africa,' Emmanuel begins, in his effortlessly booming voice. 'What is so special about the novel in Africa? What makes it different, different enough to demand our attention today?
'Well, let us see. We all know, to begin with, that the alphabet, the idea of the alphabet, did not grow up in Africa. Many things grew up in Africa, more than you might think, but not the alphabet. The alphabet had to be brought in, first by Arabs, then again by Westerners. In Africa writing itself, to say nothing of novel-writing, is a recent affair.
'Is the novel possible without novel-writing, you may ask? Did we in Africa have a novel before our friends the colonizers appeared on our doorstep? For the time being, let me merely propose the question. Later I may return to it.
'A second remark: reading is not a typically African recreation. Music, yes; dancing, yes; eating, yes; talking, yes – lots of talking. But reading, no, and particularly not reading fat novels. Reading has always struck us Africans as a strangely solitary business. It makes us uneasy. When we Africans visit great European cities like Paris and London, we notice how people on trains take books out of their bags or their pockets and retreat into solitary worlds. Each time the book comes out it is like a sign held up. Leave me alone, I am reading, says the sign. What I am reading is more interesting than you could possibly be.
'Well, we are not like that in Africa. We do not like to cut ourselves off from other people and retreat into private worlds. Nor are we used to our neighbours retreating into private worlds. Africa is a continent where people share. Reading a book by yourself is not sharing. It is like eating alone or talking alone. It is not our way. We find it a bit crazy.'
We, we, we, she thinks. We Africans. It is not our way. She has never liked we in its exclusive form. Emmanuel may have grown older, he may have acquired the blessing of American papers, but he has not changed. Africanness: a special identity, a special fate.
She has visited Africa: the highlands of Kenya, Zimbabwe, the Okavango swamps. She has seen Africans reading, ordinary Africans, at bus stops, in trains. They were not reading novels, admittedly, they were reading newspapers. But is a newspaper not as much an avenue to a private world as a novel?
'In the third place,' continues Egudu, 'in the great, beneficent global system under which we live today, it has been allotted to Africa to be the home of poverty. Africans have no money for luxuries. In Africa, a book must offer you a return for the money you spend on it. What do I stand to learn by reading this story, the African will ask? How will it advance me? We may deplore the attitude of the African, ladies and gentlemen, but we cannot dismiss it. We must take it seriously and try to understand it.
'We do of course make books in Africa. But the books we make are for children, teaching-books in the simplest sense. If you want to make money publishing books in Africa, you must put out books that will be prescribed for schools, that will be bought in quantity by the education system to be read and studied in the classroom. It does not pay to publish writers with serious ambitions, writers who write about adults and matters that concern adults. Such writers must look elsewhere for their salvation.
'Of course, ladies and gentlemen of the Northern Lights, it is not the whole picture I am giving you here today. To give you the whole picture would take all afternoon. I am giving you only a crude, hasty sketch. Of course you will find publishers in Africa, one here, one there, who will support local writers even if they will never make money. But in the broad picture, storytelling provides a livelihood neither for publishers nor for writers.
'So much for the generalities, depressing as they may be. Now let us turn our attention to ourselves, to you and to me. Here I am, you know who I am, it tells you in the programme: Emmanuel Egudu, from Nigeria, author of novels, poems, plays, winner, even, of a Commonwealth Literary Award (Africa Division). And here you are, wealthy folk, or at least comfortable, as you say (I am not wrong, am I?), from North America and Europe and of course let us not forget our Australasian representation, and perhaps I have even heard the odd word of Japanese whispered in the corridors, taking a cruise on this splendid ship, on your way to inspect one of the remoter corners of the globe, to check it out, perhaps to check it off your list. Here you are, after a good lunch, listening to this African fellow talk.
'Why, I imagine you asking yourselves, is this African fellow on board our ship? Why isn't he back at his desk in the land of his birth following his vocation, if he really is a writer, writing books? Why is he going on about the African novel, a subject that can be of only the most peripheral concern to us?
'The short answer, ladies and gentlemen, is that the African fellow is earning a living. In his own country, as I have tried to explain, he cannot earn a living. In his own country (I will not labour the point, I mention it only because it holds true for so many fellow African writers) he is in fact less than welcome. In his own country he is what is called a dissident intellectual, and dissident intellectuals must tread carefully, even in the new Nigeria.
'So here he is, abroad in the wide world, earning his living. Part of his living he earns by writing books that are published and read and reviewed and talked about and judged, for the most part, by foreigners. The rest of his living he earns from spin-offs of his writing. He reviews books by other writers, for example, in the press of Europe and America. He teaches in colleges in America, telling the youth of the New World about the exotic subject on which he is an expert in the same way that an elephant is an expert on elephants: the African novel. He addresses conferences; he sails on cruise ships. While so occupied, he lives in what are called temporary accommodations. All his addresses are temporary; he has no fixed abode.
'How easy do you think it is, ladies and gentlemen, for this fellow to be true to his essence as writer when there are all these strangers to please, month after month – publishers, readers, critics, students, all of them armed not only with their own ideas about what writing is or should be, what the novel is or should be, what Africa is or should be, but also about what being pleased is or should be? Do you think it is possible for this fellow to remain unaffected by all the pressure on him to please others, to be for them what they think he should be, to produce for them what they think he should produce?
'It may have escaped your attention, but I slipped in, a moment ago, a word that should have made you prick up your ears. I spoke about my essence and being true to my essence. There is much I could say about essence and its ramifications; but this is not the right occasion. Nevertheless, you must be asking yourselves, how in these anti-essential days, these days of fleeting identities that we pick up and wear and discard like clothing, can I justify speaking of my essence as an African writer?
'Around essence and essentialism, I should remind you, there is a long history of turmoil in African thought. You may have heard of the négritude movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Négritude, according to the originators of the movement, is the essential substratum that binds all Africans together and makes them uniquely African – not only the Africans of Africa but Africans of the great African diaspora in the New World and now in Europe.
'I want to quote some words to you from the Senegalese writer and thinker Cheikh Hamidou Kane. Cheikh Hamidou was being questioned by an interviewer, a European. I am puzzled, said the interviewer, by your praise for certain writers for being truly African. In view of the fact that the writers in question write in a foreign language (specifically French) and are published and, for the most part, read in a foreign country (specifically France), can they truly be called African writers? Are they not more properly called French writers of African origin? Is language not a more important matrix than birth?
'The following is Cheikh Hamidou's reply: "The writers I speak of are truly African because they are born in Africa, they live in Africa, their sensibility is African… What distinguishes them lies in life experience, in sensitivities, in rhythm, in style." He goes on: "A French or English writer has thousands of years of written tradition behind him… We on the other hand are heirs to an oral tradition."