A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов

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magazine, J. T. Ngugi (subsequently known as Ngugi wa Thiong’o) writes of his excitement about meeting South African Ezekiel Mphahlele and Chinua Achebe,

      The young Nigerian novelist whose two novels, Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease, seem to herald the birth of a society in which writers, freed from the burden of political protests and jibes at a disintegrating colonialism, can cast an unsentimental eye at human relationship in all its delicate and sometimes harsh intricacies … With the death of colonialism, a new society is being born. And with it a new literature.

      (Ngugi 1962, 7)

      As Ngugi wa Thiong’o would soon discover, he was being a tad optimistic about the future. In fact, his own writing career for the next fifty years would be preoccupied with various incarnations of what Gikandi, in a reading of Ngugi’s own A Grain of Wheat, terms “arrested decolonization” (2000, 98).

      It is hard to contest the fact that the debates at the conference articulated a foundational set of questions that were to preoccupy African writers and critics alike for decades to come. Expectedly, the question of defining African literature, and the related one on the language of African literature, particularly preoccupied delegates, and the discussions at the conference, and subsequently, remain foundational to critical and creative approaches to African writing to date. Interestingly, the focus on definition and language overshadowed another set of debates that were broached at the conference but did not gain as much traction subsequently: the question of audience and its implications for the circuits of production and consumption of African literature. While this set of questions is better known to contemporary scholars and writers via the work of Eileen Julien (2006) and Akin Adesokan (2012) on the extroverted novel, Pascale Casanova and Sarah Brouillette on the literary marketplace, and James English on literary value, these concerns were first flagged at the Makerere conference. In his post‐conference reflections, South African writer Bloke Modisane writes:

      Sparks flew during the session devoted to a dialogue between two publishers. Vital and sometimes penetrating questions were thrown – like poison arrows – at the publishers. Were African writers getting a square deal from publishers’ readers? Were they guided by preconceived ideas as to what an African novel ought to be? Did the publishers have African readers? Were the selections guided by the considerations of a European audience? At times the questions implied a difference between a European and an African audience and then the need for a publishing house in Africa was discussed.

      (Modisane 1962, 5)

      Like the issue of definition, this set of questions on the production and consumption of African writing was largely suspended, and to a large extent remains unresolved, returning to haunt East African writing in interesting ways. Notable here is the duo of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina and Ethiopian American Dinaw Mengestu. Wainaina’s satirical essay, “How to Write about Africa,” and his subsequent work with the Kwani Trust and Kwani magazine (see below) broach the question of problematic contemporary representations of Africa, which retain a strong appeal in the international literary market; while Dinaw Mengestu takes this challenge a step further in his novel How to Read the Air by using an unreliable narrator, Jonas Woldemarian, to both stage and subvert versions of what Mengestu terms “the Africa narrative,” precisely by weaving elaborate lies that mock American assumptions about migrants’ heartrending journeys to the US.

      In 1968, a short six years after the Makerere conference, three academics based at the University of Nairobi – Taban lo Liyong, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Henry Owuor‐Anyumba – submitted a memorandum to the acting head of the English Department at the university seeking the abolition of the department, to be replaced with a Department of African Literature and Languages. The submission was in response to a presentation by the acting head of the department to the faculty board, discussing the place of cognate departments such as Modern Languages (French) and disciplines such as Linguistics and African Languages in relation to the English Department. The three academics took strong exception to this line of thought, particularly for the manner in which it was underpinned by “a basic assumption that the English tradition and the emergence of the modern west is the central root of our consciousness and cultural heritage” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1995, 439). Instead, the three scholars emphasized the need to “orientate ourselves towards placing Kenya, East Africa, and then Africa in the centre,” not so much as a rejection of other literary cultures, but as a reconfiguring of the patterns of dominance inherited from the colonial academy in Eastern Africa which centered English studies, by “establish[ing] the centrality of Africa in the department” (441). Recognizing the influence of European literatures, Portuguese, French, Swahili, Arabic, and Asian literatures in shaping modern African literature, the three proposed that the new reconfigured department center African oral literature, modern African literature, and “a selected course in European literature” (440). Curiously, they also felt strongly about Francophone African literature and proposed that knowledge of English, Kiswahili, and French be compulsory (440). The emphasis on oral literature was in part motivated by its interdisciplinary possibilities, as it would encompass anthropology, history, psychology, religion, and philosophy while simultaneously encouraging students’ sense of rootedness and innovation. In their words, supplementing modern African Literature courses with Oral Tradition courses meant that “the new literature [would] be set in the stream of history to which it belongs and so be better appreciated; and on the other hand, be better able to embrace and assimilate other thoughts without losing its roots” (441). Overall, the emphasis was on placing “Africa at the centre of things, not existing as an appendix or satellite of other countries and literatures,” following which one could then “radiate outwards and discover peoples and worlds around us” (441).

      In the end, the three main universities in the region – the Universities of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Makerere University – replaced the English Department with Literature Departments. It would be a while, though, before the questions of value were embraced in the spirit proposed by the three scholars, especially where local popular fiction was concerned, as many of these departments retained inherited ideas of great literature and its centrality to literary studies. These same dynamics would later play out as cross‐generational tensions between the academy – primarily the University of Nairobi professoriate – and the emerging generation of young writers affiliated with the Kwani literary magazine and their iconoclastic approach to notions of the literary. A second unforeseen result was that the beneficiaries of the Ngugi–Anyumba–Taban 1972 revolution were left “stuck in their grove of stylistics, oral literature and the nineteenth‐and‐twentieth‐century European canon” to the exclusion of popular literature and

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