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African Literature Now: Standards, Texts and Canons

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African Literature Now: Standards, Texts and Canons The African e-Journals Project has digitized full text of articles of eleven social science and humanities journals. This item is from the digital archive maintained by Michigan State University Library. Find more at: http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/africanjournals/ Available through a partnership with Scroll down to read the article. Above: Yvonne Vera, Above right: Steve Chimombo, Standards, Right: Chejerai Hove, Far right: Bode Sowande Niyi Osundare N the past one year I have visited several Right: Ifeoma Nigerian Universities Okoye, Far right: Syl as Special Guest, Cheney-Coker, Guest Lecturer, or re- Below: Manama Ba. cipient of creative writers' club awards. I have also taken part in literary and cre- ative outreach visits to a number of sec- ondary schools. Ev- erywhere I have encountered a feeling of frightening anxiety, exasperation, even frustration among young talents who daily nurse the hope of becoming writers in the near future. Their main source of worry is the virtual collapse of the literary culture in Nigeria: the non- availability of well-stocked public li- braries, the scarcity of books coupled with the prohibitive prices of the avail- able few, the miserable state of pub- lishing in the country with the conse- quent shortage of outlets for new books, the drastic deterioration in the educa- tional system itself. Beyond this general picture are the harrowing individual pains. Take the affecting every cell of the continent's cre- Adelugba, Segun Olusola, Femi Johnson, case of a young, prodigiously talented ative organ. Just last week there was a Paul Worika, Mat Imerion, Betty Okotie, university graduate who walked out of a passionate discussion in the Arts Theatre Funmilayo Ajose Ajayi, etc came back to well-paid job in order to devote his whole of the University of Ibadan (Nigeria's us with archival vigour We counted time and life to the writing of a new novel. oldest University theatre) on the alarming among our losses the disappearance of f After countless foodless days and sleep- reduction of theatre practices in the coun- the Yoruba Travelling Thea res which less nights, the manuscript is ready - an try: the literal death of the repertoire combed every village in Western Nige- ambitious hand-written 600-pager which tradition, the paucity of stage activities ria in the Sixties, and whose dramaturgic shakes whatever table it is put on like an and the resultant decline in the theatre- and managerial styies enriched formai earthquake. Right now this would-be going habit of members of the university academic theatre studies and provided novelist's dream is blocked by a most community, even the physical deteriora- the subject for many scholarly works. rudimentary problem: payment of a 500- tion of the theatre itself — its leaking roof naira typing expenses—in a country and decaying wooden louvres. This is the The Arts Theatre seminar took me where a university professor's basic theatre where the great Axworthy made— forcibly back to the anxieties of the monthly salary is about 4000 naira! For and left — a mark; where the redoubtable creative writing students mentioned several months now this 'big book' has Martin Banham moulded an impressive above. Like them the seminar partici- been lingering, long-hand, yellowing array of talents; indeed the theatre in pants raised questions about the suffo- each day, in the corner of a high-risk which many of the plays which shot the cating political situation in the country, tenement room in one of Nigeria's cities. mercurial Soyinka into global repute pre- especially the curtailment of human rights Our literary which has placed culture boasts freedom ol expres- more yellowing sion in dire jeop- tales. At the Asso- ardy, the proscrip- ciation of Nige- tion of truth and rian Authors' con- the cultivation of ference in Benin silence by a ruling City last year, junta so scared of another young the power of the writer stoked my word. Many of my wonder with three u nderg raduate impressive poetry and high school manuscripts hosts actually which, if all things wanted to know were not so un- why the writing equal, should vocation is so per- have been books ilously close to toasted from danger and star- bookshop to vation in Nigeria, bookshop. But Dambudzo Marechera in Africa. Many thumb-stained, wondered if it was dog-eared, these manuscripts still remain miered to the astounded admiration of viable, even desirable to nurse the hope brittle tenants of a cockroach-infested local audiences. This is the theatre which of becoming full-time writers when they box. Some young writers are so nurtured the prolific output of Femi grew up. A smallish, sharp-faced young innundated by rejection slips that their Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Wale man asked me pointedly: 'Tell me sir, can nibs have started stumbling on the writ- Ogunyemi and many others. the present situation in Nigeria, in Africa, ing sheet. Others parade acceptance produce another Soyinka or Achebe?' letters written ten years ago by publishers Nostalgia took centre-stage at that Maybe at the end of this conference an who have since shifted their concern to gathering. Nostalgia compounded by a the production of primary school text- answer will emerge to this question. passionate mix of angst and anger books where the bread is not far from the Memory took us back to that golden era butter. Thus whether it is in Lagos, Accra, I am fully aware that the contesta- of the Seventies and early Eighties when Nairobi or Lusaka, many dreams lie tion of the image of Africa as 'victim' is the gigantic Dexter Underlay mastered locked in the coffin of the editor's draw- one of the laudable projects of this confer- every bit of that theatre and Demas ence. In other words, the world would like Nwoko's astonishing skill transformed to see a representation different from that virtually every stage set into artistic mas- Arts Theatre Seminar which projects Africa as the misery-re- terpieces. We pondered the parlous state gion of the globe, a place where all the This tragedy is not in any way of the present even as the matchless people do is wait helplessly for the next restricted to the book business. It is a virus acting and directorial voices of Dapo famine or plague, then the missionary African Quarterly on the Arts Vol. II NO 4 generosity of aid-givers, a hell-hole still the only book fair of any regularity and urgent service. Theirs, to adapt the popu- Conradianly dark. This, for sure, is the significance in the entire continent today lar pnrase of G.G. Darah, the Nigerian Western media image of Africa. We all is the one which takes place in Zimba- scholar-journalist, is the literature of social know it is not wholly true; that, in fact, in bwe? In contemporary Africa those who command, extremely sensitive to the so- some cases, it is meant to serve ulterior want to write are denied the necessary cial realities around them, but without motives, some of which are sinister in space and means; those willing to read losing sight of the aesthetic imperatives of design and execution. But in contesting cannot find the book. This is why in a their works. Thus this generation shocked this pernicious image we must not over- recent article poignantly titled literature African literature with a combativeness look the profound, almost apocalyptic and the Nation', Odia Ofeimun, poet, and radicalism never experienced be- problems besetting the African continent journalist, and current president of the fore. The thematic preoccupation remains today. Africa writers have not; which is Association of Nigerian Authors, raised the desperate situation of Africa, the stylis- why their works bristle with disturbing the alarm that our literature is being tic hallmarks are clarity and directness of images of Africa in a manner and matter 'threatened with extinction by social expression, formal experimentation, and that is excoriative and redemptive. Ac- regression.'? a deliberate incorporation of African oral cording to a popular Yoruba proverb, literary modes. 'tina o ba tan laso, eje o le tan leekan' (as The above, then, constitute the con- Frank Chipasula says it all in 'Mani- long as there are lice in the seams of the text which produces our texts. But rather festo on Ars Poetica': garment there must be bloodstains on the than allow these debacles to cow us into And I will distil life into horrible adjec fingernails). sterility and immobilism, many African tives writers have allowed them to 'hurt them I will notclean the poem to impress the 3 For isn't Africa more 'victim' today into creativity'. Because they occupy (or tyrant; than it was ten, twenty years ago? Con- are forced to occupy) a social and histori- I will not bend my verses into the bow sider the carnage in Rwanda, Somali, cal space considerably different from of a praise song Liberia; the rebellion-strained peace of that of the early Soyinka, Achebe and Sierra Leone, the Stone-Age despotism in their contemporaries, the 'post Achebe/ And I will point the light of my poems Zaire, Kenya, — and Nigeria where the Soyinka' generation have devised liter- into the dark peace and progress of a potentially mag- ary methods which differ in some signifi- Nooks where our people are pounded nificent country has been annulled with cant aspects from those of the earlier to pulp the freest and fairest election in her his- generation. There are historical and bio- tory. Or Algeria where an almost similar graphical reasons for this difference. Today my poetry has exacted a con electoral annulment has resulted in con- Born shortly before or after the rash of fession from me.
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