Africanness is fully established. So what status do we writers have, now, right here at home, in our individual countries?
Is it the kind of status we would wish — not in terms of fame and glory, invitations to dine with government ministers, but in terms of the role of literature in the illumination of our people, the opening up of lives to the power and beauty of the imagination, a revelation of themselves by the writer as the repository of a people’s ethos? Alongside the establishment of African values — which in the case of our best writers included no fear of questioning some, thus establishing that other essential component of literature’s social validity — the criterion in almost all of our countries has been the extent to which the writer has identified with and articulated, through transformations of the creative imagination, the struggle for freedom. And this, then, indeed, was the role of the writer as repository of a people’s ethos. Today the status, if to be measured on the scale of political commitment, is more complex.
Yes, economic neo-colonialism is a phase that threatens freedom, in a people’s ethos. Yes, the greedy wrangles of the Euro-North American powers to manipulate African political change for the spoils of oil supplies and military influence are concerns in a people’s ethos. Yes, the civil wars waged by their own leaders, bringing appalling suffering — these are all part of a people’s ethos to be expressed, for now that our continent has rid itself of its self-appointed masters from Europe the sense of identity in having a common enemy has eroded and in many of our countries brotherhood has become that of Cain and Abel.
Between writers and the national state, the threat of death by fatwa or secular decree, from Naguib Mahfouz to Ken Saro Wiwa and Wole Soyinka, has become the status of the writer in some of our countries. Yet these and less grim political themes tend to be the mise-en-scène of contemporary writing on our continent rather than its centrality. Africanism itself is an economic and cultural concept rather than an ideological one, now. For writers, the drama of individual and personal relations that was largely suppressed in themselves, and when indulged in was judged by their societies as trivial in comparison with the great shared traumas of the liberation struggle, now surfaces. There is so much to write about that was pushed aside by the committed creative mind, before; and there is so much to write about that never happened, couldn’t exist, before. Freedom and its joys, and — to paraphrase Freud — freedom and its discontents, are the ethos of a people for its writers now.
So we have lost the status of what one might call national engagement we had. Some few of us take on the responsibility to become writer-politicians and diplomats. But there are unlikely to be any future Léopold Sédar Senghors, poet-presidents. And I ask myself, and you: Do we writers seek, need that nature of status, the writer as politician, states-person? Is it not thrust upon us, as a patriotic duty outside the particular gifts we have to offer? Is not the ring of chalk round the eye the sign of our true calling? Whatever else we are called upon to do takes us away from the dedication we know our role as writers requires of us. As the cultural arm of liberation struggles, we met the demands of our time in that era. That was our national status. We have yet to be recognized with a status commensurate with respect for the primacy of the well-earned role of writer-as-writer in the post-colonial era.
How would we ourselves define such a status?
What do we expect, of our governments, our societies, and — in return — expect to give of ourselves to these? I have personally decisive convictions about this, constantly evolving as the country I belong to develops its cultural directions, and I am sure you have your convictions, ideas. And we need to exchange them, East — West, North-South, across our continent — that, indeed, is my first conviction. We need to meet in the flesh, take one another’s hands, hear one another.
But you and I know that the best there is in us, as writers, is in our books. The benefit and pleasure of personal contact is, in any case, limited to a fortunate few. Much more important, we need to read one another’s work. We and the people of our countries need natural and easy access to the writings that express the ethos of our neighbouring countries: what they believe, what they feel, how they make their way through the hazards and joys of living, contained by what varieties of socio-political and cultural structures they are in the process of pursuing. Four decades after the first country to attain independence, in the libraries and bookshops of our countries you still will find, apart from works by the writers of each country itself, only a handful of books by the same well-known names among African writers from other countries of our continent. Every now and then, there may be a new one, a Ben Okri who comes to us by way of recognition in Europe, along the old North — South cultural conduit. Without the pioneering work of Hans Zell, and the invaluable Heinemann African Writers Series, the publication of journals, ’from the old Présence Africaine to those bravely launched, often to a short or uneven life, by writers’ organizations or publishers in our various countries, the cross-pollination of literature in Africa would scarcely exist where it should: among ordinary readers rather than the African literati we represent, here. The best part of two generations has gone by since the African continent began its inexorable achievement of independence that has now culminated: a priority in our claim for the status of writers and writing in Africa surely is that there should be developed a Pan-African network of publishers and distributors who will co-operate — greatly to their own commercial advantage, by the way — to make our writers’ work as prominently and naturally available as the Euro-North American potboilers which fill airport bookstalls. This does not mean that we should export potboilers to one another! It means that writing of quality which readers in your countries and mine never see, unless they happen to have the resources to come across and mail-order from specialist book catalogues, would be beside our beds at night and in our hands as we travel on buses, trains, and planes.
You will say that the old obstacle of our Babel’s Tower of languages rises before an African network of publishing. But the fact is that colonial conquest, with all its destruction and deprivation, ironically left our continent with a short list of lingue franche that have been appropriated to Africa’s own ends in more ways than pragmatic communication for politics and trade. English, French, and Portuguese — these three at least are the languages used by many African writers in their work — for good or ill in relation to national culture: that is another whole debate that will continue. These three languages have virtually become adjunct African languages by rightful appropriation; and the translation into them of African language literature, which itself is and always must be the foundation and ultimate criterion of the continent’s literature, is not an obstacle but an opportunity. Where are the translation centres at our colleges and universities, where young scholars could gain deep insights into their own languages while learning the skills of translation? Here is a field of cultural advancement, cultural employment in collaboration with publishers, waiting to be cultivated. We have an OAU uniting our continent, sometimes in contention as well as common purpose, on matters of mutual concern in international affairs, governance, policy, and trade; we need an OAC, an Organization of African Culture, to do the same for Pan-African literature and the arts. Only then should we have a ‘world literature’: the world of our own, our challenge to the title each culturo-political and linguistic grouping on our planet has the hubris to claim for itself.