English and the African Writer

Abstract

English and the African Writer IN JUNE, 1962, there was a writers' gathering at Makerere, impressively styled: "A Conference of African Writers of English Expression." Despite this sonorous and rather solemn title it turned out to be a very lively affair and a very exciting and useful experience for many of us. But there was something which we tried to do and failed-that was to define "African Literature" satisfactorily. Was it literature produced in Africa or about Africa? Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole continent or South of the Sahara, or just Black Africa ? And then the question of language. Should it be in indigenous African languages or should it include Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, etc.? In the end we gave up trying to find an answer partly-I should admit-on my own instigation. Perhaps we should not have given up so easily. It seems to me from some of the things I have since heard and read that we may have given the impression of not knowing what we were doing, or worse, not daring to look too closely at it. A Nigerian critic, Obi Wali, writing in Transition 10 said: "Perhaps the most important achievement of the conference. .. is that African literature as now de-filled and understood leads nowhere." I am sure that Obi Wali must have felt triumphantly vindicated when he saw the report of a different kind of conference held later at Fourah Bay to discuss African literature and the University curriculum. This conference produced a tentative definition of African literature as follows: "Creative writing in which an African setting is authentically handled or to which experiences originating in Africa are integral." We are told specifically that Conrad's Heart of Darkness qualifies as African literature while Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter fails because it could have been set anywhere outside Africa. A number of interesting speculations issue from this definition which admittedly is only an interim formulation designed to produce a certain desirable end, namely, to introduce African students to literature set in their environment. But I could not help being amused by the curious circumstances in which Conrad, a Pole, writing in English produced African literature! On the other hand if Peter Abrahams were to write a good novel based on his experiences in the West Indies it would not be accepted as African literature. 1 8 What all this suggests to me is that you cannot cram African literature into a small, neat definition. I do not see African literature as one unit but as a group of associated units-in fact the sum total of all the national and ethnic literatures of Africa. A national literature is one that takes the whole nation for its province, and has a realised or potential audience throughout its territory. In other words a literature that is written in the national language. An ethnic literature is one which is available only to one ethnic group within the nation. If you take Nigeria as an example, the national literature, as I see it, is the literature written in English; and the ethnic literatures are in Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Effik, Edo, Ijaw, etc., etc. Any attempt to define African literature in terms which overlook the complexities of the African scene and the material of time is doomed to failure. After the elimination of white rule shall have been completed, the single most important fact in Afiica in the second half of the twentieth century will appear to be the rise of individual nation states. I believe that African litetature will follow the same pattern. What we tend to do today is to think of African literature as a newborn infant. But in fact what we have is a whole generation of newborn infants. Of course if you only look cursorily one infant looks very much like another; but each is already set on its own journey. Of course, you may group them together on the basis of anything you choose-the colour of their hair, for instance. Or you may group them on the basis of the language they will speak or the rqligion of their fathers. Those would all be valid distinctions; but they could not begin to account fully for each individual person carrying, as it were, his own little lodestar of genes. Those, who in talking about African literature want to exclude North Africa because it belongs to a different tradition surely do not suggest that Black Africa is anything like homogenous. What does Shabaan Robert have in common with Christopher Okigbo or Awoonor-Williams? Mongo Beti of Cameroun and Paris with Nzekwu of Nigeria; or what does the champagne-drinking upper-class Creole society described by Easmon of Sierra Leone have in common with the rural folk and and fishermen of J. P. Clark's plays? Of course, some of these differences could be accounted for on individual rather than national grounds but a good deal of it is also environmental. 27