ideology

224 Pages·2006·1.75 MB·English

IDEOLOGY
Second Mrican Writers' Conference
Stockh01m1 986
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. He pointed out the serious conse-
quences of a changed language policy for the stability of Nigeria. The two
points made by Soyinka in the linguistic debate, namely the charge of pom-
posity and the political considerations were taken up and further developed
by Kole Omotoso in his paper 'The Languages of our Dreams and the
Dreams of our Languages.' He, like Soyinka, advocates the use of English
on grounds of expedience, but at the same time they both support the fur-
therance of indigenous languages. Kole Omotoso warns against a kind of
modern illiteracy, whereby the speakers master neither their own nor the
imposed language, but have an incomplete knowledge of both.
Eldred Jones could only have been pleased to find that his sentiments
about the language question nearly twenty years ago met with general
agreement on the second occasion. We was, however, not so pleased with
Bernth Lindfors, Early Nigerian Literature, (New York, Africans, 1982), pp 111-41.