IDEOLOGY Second Mrican Writers' Conference Stockh01m1986 Edited by with an lin"Coductory essay by Kii-sten B-olst Peitersen Per W&stbei-g Seminar Proceedings No. 28 Scandinavian Institute of African Studjes Seminar Proceedings No. 20 CRITICISM AND IDEOLOGY Second African Writers9 Conference Stockholm 1986 Edited by Kirsten Holst Petersen with an introductory essay by Per Wastberg Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala 1988 Cover: "Nairobi City Centre", painting by Ancent Soi, Kenya, reproduced with the permission of Gunter PCus. ISSN 0281 -00 18 ISBN 91-7106-276-9 @ Nordiska afrikainstitutet, 1988 Phototypesetting by Textgruppen i Uppsala AB Printed in Sweden by Bohuslaningens Boktryckeri AB, Uddevalla 1988 Foreword The first Stockholm conference for African writers was held in 1967, at Hasselby Castle outside Stockholm, to discuss the role of the writer in mo- dern African Society, especially the relationship of his or her individuality to a wider social commitment. It was arranged on the initiative of Per Wastberg, well-known for having introduced much of African literature to the Swedish public. On Per Wastberg's initiative the Second Stockholm Conference for Afri- can Writers was arranged almost twenty years later. This time the Scandi- navian Institute of African Studies was again privileged to arrange the con- ference in cooperation with the Swedish Institute. We extend our gratitude to the Swedish Institute, the Swedish Interna- tional Development Authority (SIDA), and the Ministry for Foreign Af- fairs for generous financial support. We wish to thank our former Danish researcher Kirsten Holst Petersen for her skilful work in arranging the con- ference and editing this book. Anders Hjort af Ornas Director Contents Introduction Kirsten Holst Petersen The Writer in Modern Africa Per Wastberg Ethics, ldeology and the Critic Wole Soyinka From the discussion The Languages of Our Dreams or the Dreams of Our Languages Kole Omotoso The Price of Independence: The Writers' Agony Eldred D. Jones From the discussion The Growth of a Literary Tradition Chris Wanjala From the discussion Reverend Doctor John S. Mbiti is a Thief of Gods Taban 10 Liyong Writing Against Neo-colonialism Ngugi wa Thiong'o Censoring the African Poem: Personal Reflections Jack Mapanje The Socio-Psychological Development of Africa David G. Maillu The Role of the African Writer in National Liberation and Social Reconstruction Emmanuel Ngara African Motherhood - Myth and Reality Lauretta Ngcobo From the discussion To Be an African Woman Writer - an Overview and a Detail Ama Ata Aidoo Feminism with a small 'f'! Buchi Emecheta From the discussion To What Extent is the South African Writer's Problem Still Bleak and Immense? Sipho Sepamla Power to the People: A Glory to Creativity Wally Serote The Dominant Tone of Black South African Writing Miriam Tlali From the discussion Beyond 'Protest': New Directions in South African Literature Njabulo Ndebele From the discussion About the Contributors Introduction Kirsten Holst Petersen The present volume consists of the papers and highlights of the discussions from the second Stockholm Conference for African Writers, held in 1986. The report from the first Stockholm conference The Writer in Modern Africa provided an important testimony to the mood and preoccupations of African writers in 1967. The mood was sombre on account of the recent outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War, and the debate understandably con- cerned itself with the writer's role in oppressive or war-torn situations. In a passionate submission Soyinka denounced negritude, yet again, and asked the writer to be true to his heritage, which is to be not just 'the recorder of the mores and experience of his society,' but also 'the voice of vision in his own time'. 'Gun running and holding up radio stations' be- came the catchwords around which the writer debated their ideas of com- mitment. Ngugi and Alex la Guma were all for it, Lewis Nkosi was elegantly controversial, maintaining that writers 'were going to do no such thing' as provide a vision, and anyway, they tended to be 'congenial shirkers', and their commitment as writers was to literature, not society, and John Nagenda went all the way and declared that all he cared about was his 'individual capacity . to live my life in this world before I die'. Negritude received more and more detailed criticism from Mbelle Sonne Dipoko, who accused the African intellectuals of 'becoming ambassadors, taking news of Africa to the courts of Europe'. The language question was touched upon with less venom than on subsequent occasions. Eldred Jones held that the aim of the African writer should be 'to be faithful to his own imagination, whatever language and whatever medium he happens to be using', and that statement remained surprisingly unopposed. What are the main areas of debate when African writers meet, nearly twenty years later? Negritude, the language debate and the question of commitment were still there, but added to them were new areas of interest, which centred around criticism and the critic, the state of South African literature and the new, or newly acknowledged voice of African women writers who provided the clearest example of change and renewal since the first conference, which was attended only by male writers. In 'Ethics, Ideology and the Critic' Soyinka delivers a blast at critics of African literature who have obviously irritated him for some time. Despite 8 Kirsten Holst Petersen his stated intention to be 'as light-hearted as possible' Soyinka here be- comes intensely polemic, in the same vein as the Transition' debate, and his paper is peppered with expressions like 'goggle-eyed, loin-clothed jungleman aesthetics', 'more ethnic than thou sanctimonious shit', and 'our literary school of infantile regression'. He arranges the critics along a descending scale, starting with lovers of literature and ending with the chichidodo school. In between he puts ideologically committed critics, con- sisting of two groups, Marxist critics and the well known neo-Tarzanists. Ideologically, those two groups have very little in common. In fact they are at a certain point diametrically opposed. Soyinka, however, rages both against the neo-Tarzanists' elevation of aspects of traditional culture to aesthetic laws and against Marxist reduction of the same culture to 'false consciousness'. He does, however, acknowledge the difference between the two groups, and he seems to have a higher regard for the Marxists, but ultimately, for him 'Ideology is ideology' and per se destructive of criticism. He is here reiterating his position in 'Ideology and the Social Vi- sion: The Religious Factor' (Myth, Literature and the African World, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976, p 61) where he said 'yes' to a social vision, but no to a literary ideology. This levelling of ideology to an oppressive system, regardless of its content, is particularly galling from a Marxist point of view, and Soyinka has increasingly become the subject of committed and penetrating Marxist analyses from critics like Biodun Jeyifo and Femi Osofisan who are not easily dismissed. Soyinka next focuses on expatriate critics, whom he puts into two categories, those who are simply too stupid to become anything else but critics of African literature, and the industrious ones who irritate him be- cause they dig up juvenalia which he himself is not very proud of, and publish it. At the very bottom of the rung we find the chichidodo school, named after the mythical bird in Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, which hates excrement, but also feeds on it. Soyinka provides ex- amples of these 'un-critical tendencies', and he widens the scope by includ- ing a comparison with critical treatments of black American writers. Through selective quoting he arrives at a critical contradiction. Claude McKay is a self-confessed 'whitey-pleaser' because of his simplistic poetry, written in a southern dialect form, and the little known poet M B Tolson is accused of being the same, because he is said to be 'intricate, erudite and I Wole Soyinka, 'Neo-Tarzanism: The Poetics of Pseudo-Tradition', in Transition Vol 9, April/June 1975, pp 38-43. See also Chinweizu et al 'Towards the Decolonization of African Literature' in Okike No 6, December 1974, pp 11-27, and No 7, April 1975, pp 65-81. Introduction 9 obscure'. In other words, you can't win! Soyinka is understandably touchy about the 'whitey-pleaser' epithet, as his eclecticism and his international frame of reference is interpreted as just that by the Africanist school of critics (neo-Tarzanists), and he makes a rather desperate plea for more subtlety and a wider horizon on the part of the critics. He also argues against the prevailing tendency in African literary criticism to turn criticism into sociology and use it to debate or even prove political opinions. A logical aspect of the controversy between an indigenous versus an in- ternational outlook is the language question. The scope of this debate is also widened by a comparison with American black southern dialect and its elevation into a literary language, and Soyinka's argument here is not surprisingly that this could be either good or bad, but the important thing is to not create an orthodoxy of it and become prescriptive. Transferred to the African scene this becomes a very direct attack on Ngugi's position 'Let us not have this exaggeration of coming-homeness, which exists about certain writers'. He is at pains to debunk the ideological seriousness of the indigenous language school; to his mind they are 'not doing anything original', and yet 'parading' their ideas. This seems to be a linguistic exten- sion of the 'tigritude' remark, embodying the idea from 'The Future of African Writing' (1960) that 'the real mark of authenticity in African writing was indifferent self-acceptance rather than energetic racial self- a~sertion'.~ The language debate, as it developed throughout the conference reflected very narrowly the political/geographical background of the writers, and Soyinka was no exception.