What you expect me to sing, I will not,
What you do not expect me to croak, I will.
— 2nd PAWA Annual Lecture, Pan African Writers Association
5th International African Writers’ Day Celebration
Accra, Ghana, 1–7 November 1997
TURNING THE PAGE: AFRICAN WRITERS AND THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
Writers in Africa in the twentieth century, now coming to an end, have interpreted the greatest events on our continent since the abolition of slavery.
We have known that our task was to bring to our people’s consciousness and that of the world the true dimensions of racism and colonialism beyond those that can be reached by the newspaper column and screen image, however valuable these may be. We have sought the fingerprint of flesh on history.
The odds against developing as a writer able to take on this huge responsibility have been great for most of our writers. But as Agostinho Neto, Angolan poet and president, said, and proved in his own life: ‘If writing is one of the conditions of your being alive, you create that condition.’
Out of adversity, out of oppression, in spite of everything. .
Looking forward into the twenty-first century, I think we have the right to assess what we have come through. Being here; the particular time and place that has been twentieth-century Africa. This has been a position with particular implications for literature; we have lived and worked through fearful epochs. Inevitably, the characteristic of African literature during the struggle against colonialism and, latterly, neocolonialism and corruption in post-colonial societies, has been engagement — political engagement.
Now, unfortunately, many people see this concept of engagement as a limited category closed to the range of life reflected in literature; it is regarded as some sort of upmarket version of propaganda. Engagement is not understood for what it really has been, in the hands of honest and talented writers: the writer’s exploration of the particular meaning his or her being has taken on in this time and place. For real ‘engagement’, for the writer, isn’t something set apart from the range of the creative imagination. It isn’t something dictated by brothers and sisters in the cause he or she shares with them. It comes from within the writer, his or her creative destiny, living in history. ‘Engagement’ doesn’t preclude the beauty of language, the complexity of human emotions; on the contrary, such literature must be able to use all these in order to be truly engaged with life, where the overwhelming factor in that life is political struggle.
While living and writing under these conditions in Africa, we have seen our books banned — and we have gone on writing. Many of our writers, including Wole Soyinka, have been imprisoned, and many, including Chinua Achebe, Dennis Brutus, Nuruddin Farah, have been forced to choose exile. I think of immensely talented Can Themba, Alex La Guma, and Dambudzo Marechera, who died there; lost to us.
• • •
What do we in Africa hope to achieve, as writers, in the new century? Because we are writers, can we expect to realize literally, through our work, that symbol of change, the turning to a fresh page?
What are the conditions under which we may expect to write — ideological, material, social?
It seems to me that these are the two basic questions for the future of African literature. I think it’s generally agreed that consonance with the needs of the people is the imperative for the future in our view of our literature. This is the point of departure from the past; there, literature played the immeasurably valuable part of articulating the people’s political struggle, but I do not believe it can be said to have enriched their lives with a literary culture. And I take it that our premise, in Africa, is that a literary culture is a people’s right.
We all make the approach from our experience in the twentieth century. We all hazard predictions, since we do not know in what circumstances our ambitions for a developing literature will need to be carried out. We have our ideas and convictions of how literary development should be consonant with the needs of our people; we cannot know with what manner of political and social orders we shall have to seek that consonance.
I think we have to be completely open-eyed about the relation between our two basic questions. We have to recognize that the first — what we hope to achieve in terms of literary directions — is heavily dependent on the second: the conditions under which we shall be working as writers. A literary culture cannot be created by writers without readers. There are no readers without adequate education. It’s as simple — and dire — as that. No matter how much we encourage writers who are able to fulfill, according to their talents, the various kinds and levels of writing that will take literature out of the forbidding context of unattainable intellectualism, we shall never succeed until there is a wide readership competent beyond school-primer and comic-book level. And where there are readers there must be libraries where the new literature we hope to nurture, satisfying the need of identification with people’s own daily lives, and the general literature that brings the great mind-opening works of the world to them, are easily available to them.
Will these potential readers find prose, poetry, and nonfiction in their mother tongues?
If we are to create a twenty-first-century African literature, how is this to be done while publishing in African languages remains mainly confined to works prescribed for study, market-stall booklets, religious tracts? We have long accepted that Africa cannot, and so far as her people are concerned, has no desire to, create a ‘pure’ culture in linguistic terms; this is an anachronism when for purposes of material development the continent eagerly seeks means of technological development from all over the world.
We all know that there is no such workable system as a purely indigenous economy once everyone wants computers and movie cassettes.
Neither, in a future of increasing intercontinental contact, can there be a ‘pure’ indigenous culture. We see, a plain fact all over Africa, that the European languages that came with colonial conquest have been taken over into independence, acquired by Africans and made part and parcel of their own convenience and culture. The brilliant examples of this acquisition are there to be read in the work of some black African writers. (Whites, of course, have never had the good sense to do the same with African languages. .)
But we writers cannot speak of taking up the challenge of a new century for African literature unless writing in African languages becomes the major component of the continent’s literature. Without this, one cannot speak of an African literature. It must be the basis of the cultural cross-currents that will both buffet and stimulate that literature.
What of publishing?
We write the books; to come alive, they have to be read. To be available, they have to be competently distributed, not only in terms of libraries, but also commercially. Many of us in Africa have had experience of trying to meet the needs of the culturally marginalised by launching small, non-profit publishing ventures in African literature. We find ourselves stopped short by the fact that the distribution network, certainly in the southern African countries (I don’t imagine there is much difference in countries to the north), remains the same old colonial one. Less than a handful of distribution networks make decisions, based on the lowest common denominator of literary value, on what books should be bought from publishers, and this handful has the only means of distributing these widely to the public, since they own the chain bookstores which dominate the trade in the cities and are the only existing bookstores in most small towns. In South Africa, for example, in the twentieth century, there have been and are virtually no bookstores in the vast areas where blacks have been confined under apartheid.