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Badaru Basiru |
-Badaru Basiru
Badaru Basiru is a Nigerian writer, poet, playwright, actor, journalist. He has interest in Law, Literature, Film and Music.
I have often thought about the summation of the 1962 Conference of African Writers of English Expression held at Makerere University, Uganda, and the discussion about the choice of language in African literature, which has been relevant 62 years after.
The continuing relevance of the conference is the recurring dilemma of the African writer when it comes to his craft and the medium of its expression. Being a product of diametrically opposed systems, the African writer has to choose between sticking to his origin, which comprises his first language, religion, cultural and social dictates, and embracing the European culture that the Western education system he has gone through alluringly presents to him as "superior" to his "primitive African background". He has to decide, a precarious decision indeed, to be either his original self or a fake self, wear his own cloak, which he can proudly call his, or a borrowed one that can never be his.
Among the eminent African literary scholars at the Makerere Conference was Obi Wali, who published in Transition Magazine an article, "The Dead End of African Literature", that has remained a reliable reference material for students of African literature. Wali's proposition favoured the development of African literature in indigenous African languages rather than in European languages, English and French, which would only perpetuate the cultural hegemony by the European colonialists. Obi observed:
"... African literature as now understood and practised, is merely a minor appendage in the main stream of European literature. Both creative writers and literary critics read and devour European literature and critical methods . . . The consequence of this kind of literature is that it lacks any blood and stamina, and has no means of self-enrichment. It is severely limited to the European-oriented, few college graduates in the new Universities of Africa, steeped as they are in European literature and culture."
There can be no denying the fact that modern African writers were heavily influenced by European writers. In fact, they were weaned on European classics, and most of their subsequent literary outputs were covert rejoinders to the European authors of the books they had guzzled in school and deciphered the condescending depiction and, in some passages, the complete erasure of the humanness of the African and his precolonial civilisational achievements and contributions to culture when literacy itself, as we know it today, was propagated by Africans and in Africa, as the Egyptian hieroglyphic writings abound in evidence of the ancient African wisdom predating the Greco-Roman civilisation by thousands of years.
The Greeks would cross over the Mediterranean Sea, land in Egypt (Kemet) as students, absorb knowledge and go back to spread it in Greece. They then civilised the Romans who then civilised the rest of Europeans who were wallowing in savagery, in total darkness. In those pre-Jewish, pre-Christian and pre-Islamic days, Egypt was the centre of knowledge, the cradle of sophistication, that attracted peoples from different parts of the world. Black Africans were integral to the Egyptian society, reigning as Pharaohs over a chain of dynasties. The Great Sphinx was sculpted with features typical of the Negroid race (fat face, flat nose, thick lips). A lot of statues and wall drawings could be interpreted as relics of an unmistakably black African presence in Kemet. The mathematical and geometric precision that must have gone into the construction of the Great Pyramids of Giza, the harshness of the weather condition, the sheer physical work, could have been endured only by the Blacks. But the colonisers would write that Egypt was built by Mediterraneans, meaning Europeans, and that Africans were "savages" grunting and hopping from one tree to another, "subhuman creatures" that had no historical past. Well, we had a history, and that history was the beginning of history itself by our ancestors.
Because how is it that there no pyramids in Europe if those in Egypt were really put up by the Mediterraneans? Why would they not erect in their land such monumental edifices as the Egyptian temples, tombs and palaces that still attract tourists and are among the most breathtaking wonders of human civilisation? Why would they impoverish their culture and enrich someone else's?
Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart (1958), was encouraged, after reading Joyce Cary's Mister Johnson, to become a writer and "set the record straight". He would in 1977 publish in The Massachusetts Review his trenchant lecture, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness", arguing that "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man’s vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality." Achebe's editorship of Heinemann's African Writers Series did consolidate his task of "setting the record straight" with the publishing of brilliant African writers across the continent, including the unpublished young Makerere attendee, James Ngugi, who would emerge as a witty voice in the postcolonial African literary discourse and drop the Christian name "James" for the traditional "Ngugi wa Thiong'o", deciding to write henceforth in his Gikuyu language.
But Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and other attendees of the conference stuck to writing in the colonial languages and would not revert to their first languages, like Ngugi wa Thiong'o did, for reasons of broader audience outreach and cultural limitation. For this school of thought, the urge to "play to the gallery of international fame" was much stronger than the advocacy for African literature in indigenous African languages. Their stance was based on the belief that their authenticity and Africanness, whether they wrote in English or French, would definitely show in their works. And the amount of global publicity that these foremost Nigerian writers enjoyed testified to the validity of their opting for English as a medium of literary production.
If Achebe had written in Igbo his magnum opus Things Fall Apart, Heinemann's educational adviser, Donald MacRae, might not have approved of the novel, and there would not have been all the hype by Western literary reviewers and Achebe's appellation of Father of African Literature, though Thomas Mofolo had published his Sesotho novels Moeti oa Bochabela (1907), Pitseng (1910), Chaka (1925) much earlier than Things Fall Apart. The same would have been Soyinka's fate, like the Yoruba novelist D. O. Fagunwa's, if he had written in Yoruba his The Swamp Dwellers (1958), The Lion and the Jewel (1959), A Dance of the Forest (1960), The Trials of Brother Jero (1960), The Road (1965), his many satirical plays, obscurantic poems, novels and essays, and he would not have been the first Sub-Saharan African writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986 and regarded indisputably as the "African version of William Shakespeare".
It is this yearning for international recognition, for avoiding the misfortune of the obscure local writer, that so pathetically overwhelms the African writer educated in the tradition of European literature and philosophy that he migrates to the West where, patronised by Western literary critics, he establishes a career, wins prizes funded by Western institutions, and is enticed to live there with securement of Creative Writing tenure at universities. And with strings of success in his trade, invitations to events he is likely to be the "only black man at the table", shaking hands with influential people he had watched only on television when he was struggling, the African writer residing in the West begins to see himself as a sort of an identity ambassador, even a political messiah upon whose shoulder lies the hectic responsibility of fighting the endemic corruption in his country, ignoring his supposed duty of strengthening the literature in his native language. In the unfortunate event that he fails, after all the bootlicking and hobnobbing, to win the coveted Western awards, he becomes frustrated and is ashamed to return to his origin because he now feels he has outgrown it. Obi Wali pointed:
"It is to point out that the whole uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium for educated African writing, is misdirected, and has no chance of advancing African literature and culture. In other words, until these writers and their western midwives accept the fact that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they would be merely pursuing a dead end, which can only lead to sterility, uncreativity, and frustration."
An exception to the category of African writers desperate for Western literary intervention is the Ghanaian prose stylist, Ayi Kwei Armah, who has lived in the Senegalese coastal village of Popenguine for more than 40 years and rarely left Africa. Armah could have stayed permanently in the United States of America, where he was educated at the prestigious Harvard University and Columbia University, but he came back home among Africanist thinkers such as the historical scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop, and the novelist and filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene. The pure Africanism in Armah's novels, and in his humble lifestyle, is unmissable to the extent that it was most unfair of someone of the calibre of Achebe, who lived and died in America, to remark that Armah's writing was not "African". Perhaps, in Achebe's definition, to be African is not to write in an indigenous African language, as Obi Wali expounds, but to write in English a story about a rustic's travails, and not about the individual's struggle against his society's and immediate family's excessive materialism and moral defect in Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Armah's indifference to Western validation is such that he hardly submits his works for prizes that are clearly established to further entrench Western cultural imperialism, though the artistry, poeticality, depth and delineation of his novels, his narrative and descriptive powers are unequalled.
The other Africanist who, like Armah, had shunned Western laurels was Sembene, who had realised the effectiveness of film in information dissemination early enough to be called Father of African Cinema. Sembene started as a writer with the publication of the critically acclaimed novels Le Docker Noir (1956), O pays, mon beau peuple! (1957), Les Bouts de Bois de Dieu (1960), but the problem of language, as most of the common men and women could not read in French, made him go into cinema to make films in the Wolof language of the Senegalese people. He had confessed he preferred literature to film, but the need for enlightening his poor countrymen on the pressing political and social issues bedevilling Africa was more important than his personal preference.
With the films Borom Sarret (1963), Black Girl (1966), Mandabi (1968), Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), Camp de Thiaroye (1987), Guelwaar (1993), and Moolade (2004), Sembene sealed his reputation as a literary and cinematic intellectual iconoclastic of the religious, social and political subjugation of the Senegalese as well as the African people. Up to his death in 2007, Sembene held on to his Afrocentric ideology and did for African cinema exactly what Satyajit Ray did for Indian cinema. I was particularly absorbed in the foreign aid scene in Guelwaar in which the character delivers a public speech in the presence of political leaders, quoting the 17th-century Senegambian thinker, Kocc Barma Fall:
"Famine and diseases are not disgraces. Our leaders gather us here. You know why? Only to welcome these donations . . . As for us, we mute people, without any dignity, we dance in front of this aid. What humiliation!
When will we realize that a family cannot be built, cannot solidify, cannot take root in perpetual begging?
This donation scene has repeated itself for 30 years here and elsewhere. This frequently-distributed aid is killing us. It's killing every vague attempt at pride and dignity in us. These small tribes that offer us with false bravado laugh at us behind our backs . . . Admittedly, we are plaqued by all sorts of disasters. And so it's up to us to confront, not up to others! It's up to us alone. Our ancestor Kocc Barma said: 'If you want to kill a proud man, give him what he needs to live every day. In the long run, you've made him a serf."
Sembene's Guelwaar proved Obi Wali's assertion that only an African literature produced in an African language has the possibility of reaching the vast majority of Africans and communicating to them the message intended for their awareness. The film coincided with Senegal's 1993 elections, which forced the Senegalese political actors to delay its release because its anti-foreign-aid theme was against the then government's policy. Obi asserted:
"The ordinary local audience, with little or no education in the conventional European manner, and who constitute an overwhelming majority, has no chance of participating in this kind of literature."
Indeed, for true participation of the African populace, for genuine African literature, there is no other way than constructing novels, poems and plays in languages native to Africa and understood by Africans like the European writers we, contemporary African writers, study and imitate did for their respective languages. Our desire for renown overseas should not be at the expense of our mother tongues, which are acutely underpublished compared to the overpublished English language that has dominated world literature even after the fall of the British Empire and granting of "independence" to the Global South countries of Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The linguistic indigenisation of African literature is non-negotiable for the sake of unalloyed Africanity. Obi Wali was critically thoughtful:
"One wonders what would have happened to English literature for instance, if writers like Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, had neglected English, and written in Latin and Greek simply because these classical languages were the cosmopolitan languages of their times . . . What therefore is now described as African literature in English and French, is a clear contradiction, and a false proposition, just as Italian literature in Hausa would be."
Of course, Italian or German literature in Hausa would sound ridiculous because the Hausa people had never, in their history, ventured to colonise the Italian or German people, but Hausa literature in English would sound less ridiculous since the Hausaland had been a part of the contraption called NIGERIA, which the English had ruled over and so had had a direct relation with. Additionally, it was the Englishman, Rupert East, as Educational Superintendent of the Translation Bureau of Northern Nigeria, who organised the first Hausa writing competition in 1933, which Abubakar Imam's debut novel Ruwan Bagaja won. Mallam Imam later published his major work Magana Jari Ce, spearheading together with several other Hausa novelists the development of Hausa literature in the Latin script as against the Ajami script (Hausa in Arabic letters), which had existed as far back as the 1400s through the 1600s down to the 1800s, a period characterised by the Islamic crusades of the reformer, Sheikh Usman Danfodio, his prolific writings and his children's, mostly poetry and scholarly books, and an emiratist monarchy.
The 1950s and 1960s witnessed a surge of Hausa poetry. With the end of World War II in 1945, in which Nigerians fought on the side of the British and died for a cause that they knew nothing about, and India's independence from Britain in 1947, nationalist politicians across Africa were inevitably incited to hasten the process of political freedom, which Ghana became the first to achieve in 1957, hence the proliferation of fecund political poets such as Sa'adu Zungur, Mu'azu Hadejia, Aminu Kano, Mudi Sipikin, Shehu Shagari, Akilu Aliyu, Aliyu Namangi and the Pan-African poetic virtuoso, Abubakar Ladan Zaria, who wrote and sang the famous poem Wakar Hada Kan Afirka in celebration of the 1963 formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Or African literature could be bilingual, written both in the European and African languages, through translation. But so much is always lost in the course of translation that writers who can write bilingually would essentially want to write in the language into which their writings would be translated, especially writers from multilingual countries, where in every region or state there is a local language that dominates others in everyday usage.
I am Hausa. I speak and write in English out of necessity. If I wrote in Hausa, only my fellow Hausa speakers would understand me, and my writing would be restricted within Nigeria, Niger Republic, Chad, Cameroon, Ghana and a few West African countries; and my East African friends from Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, who speak Kiswahili, would not care to read me. If all these years I had written on Facebook solely in Hausa, I would not have met my Dutch patron, Hilde, my mother from another land, whose trust has changed my perception and reinforced my belief in the goodness of humanity. If not through English, I would not have known either the cerebral Indians editing Setu Bilingual Literary Journal, Sunil and Anurag, whose first language is Hindi, and the cultural exchange, which is crucial to human understanding, would not have ensued.
One everlasting legacy of British colonialism in the formerly colonised countries is the English language. At least, there is a single language that has almost become universal, uniting cultures, functioning as a medium of communication for all, overshadowing its Germanic family members. An African writer writing in English or French may be chronically Westernised, a European in BLACK SKIN, but it is the best way to amplify his voice, to relay his own side of the story to counteract the incorrect sides peddled to reduce his worth in the eyes of the world, to defeat him even in his psyche. And only in the language of the one who cooked up such falsehood could this mission be accomplished.
References
---Wali, Obi. The Dead End of African Literature (Transition Magazine, 1963)
---Achebe, Chinua. An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (The Massachusetts Review, 1977)
---Diop, Cheikh Anta. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (New York: L. Hill, 1974)
---Hickey, Raymond. The Rise and Fall of Hausa as a Written Language (Daily Trust Newspaper, Jan. 14, 2018)
---Sembene, Ousamne. Guelwaar (1993)
This article provides worth full insight about the struggles for African literature.
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