AiW Guest Sara Marzagora.

This post is the second in an occasional series of writer profiles, looking especially at those working in African languages. The first post in our series was on Akinwumi Isola.

Mengistu Lemma (1928-1988)

If you ask Amharic speakers about their literary preferences, the response is almost always unanimous. The best Amharic novelist is Haddis Alemayehu and the best poet Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin. Tsegaye also wrote for theatre, and his tragedies are thought to be the finest in Amharic literature – but when it comes to comedies Mengistu Lemma always tops the list of favourite playwrights.

His two most famous plays are T’älfo Bäkise (“Marriage by Abduction”, 1968-69) and Yalačča Gabïčča (“Marriage of Unequals”, 1964-65). They are humorous in tone and the action is dotted with plot twists and comic instances. Yet the two comedies are conceived as something very far from mere entertainment. Mengistu maintained that he was “a realist, not dealing with fantasy but in social criticism”. He used the comedies as a didactic vehicle for his political ideas – “Marriage by abduction” is a reflection over the age-old custom of abducting a woman in order to marry her; “Marriage of Unequals” challenges Ethiopian class-conscious society and promotes inter-class marriage.

Mengistu Lemma

Mengistu was indeed a prominent exponent of a well-established progressive movement in Ethiopian intellectual history. From the 1920s to the late 1960s, two generations of Ethiopian intellectuals sought to implement in the country a hybrid modernisation model, in which carefully-selected elements of Western society and economics were to be implanted in the Ethiopian socio-political tradition. Mengistu admired the practical know-how of European societies, but at the same time satirized the superficial Europhilia that was spreading in Ethiopia in the sphere of lifestyle and morality. In “Marriage of Unequals”, the protagonist is asked to marry an “Europeanised” woman, with the reassuring clarification that her ‘modern’ attitude is “only on the surface – a matter of clothes and hair-do, of Amharic accent, of the way she walks and talks. It has not percolated deeper”.

But Mengistu was not only a playwright, but also an incredibly famous poet – and it is in his poems that his literary vision emerges even more clearly. His poetic work YäGït’ïm guba’e’ (“Synod of Poetry”, 1964-65), was described by Dr. Martin Orwin, Senior Lecturer in Amharic and Somali at SOAS, as “a wonderful collection of poems which moved the style of Amharic poetry forwards, building on the pioneering work of figures such as Kebbede Mika’el whilst still retaining a flavour of the traditional poetic style of oral poetry”. Mengistu’s friend and eminent Ethiopianist scholar Richard Pankhurst remembers how Mengistu was seeking to create a type of poetry “traditional in form but progressive in content”.

And he was in a good position to achieve this goal: he received a traditional Church education in Ethiopia, but later studied abroad in London for many years. His father was a Christian Orthodox priest and scholar, and Mengistu was educated in the religious language of Ge’ez, in Bible studies and in traditional poetry. He became a master in the use of qené, a type of poetry based on the ‘wax and gold’ technique, i.e. the traditional double-layer construction of a poem whereas hidden ‘golden’ meanings are to be fabricated by melting the ‘waxy’ surface of the words. His attachment to the Ethiopian literary heritage is evident in Yabbatočč č’äwata (“Tales of the Forefathers”), a collection of folktales and stories published in 1960-61. His father had a special place among these ‘forefathers’. Mengistu often repeated that his father was perhaps the single most influential figure in his life, and honoured him by writing a biography on his father’s intellectual and social trajectory, Mäs’häfa tizita ze-Aleqa Lemma (“The Book of Memories of Aleqa Lemma”). The book is based on tape-recorded conversations with his then 95-year-old parent, and Mengistu appears to have been willing to retain in his transcriptions the feeling of a dialogue – the biography maintains indeed an eminently oral style. This work is a homage, Reidulf Molvaer remarked, “to an older generation of Ethiopian scholars who preserved and enriched their culture” and whose influence is “strongly felt even today”.

But London had a great impact on him too. After high school in Addis Ababa he got a scholarship to study at the London School of Economics. He would spend 7 years in London, from 1948 to 1954. There, he came to nuance the sentiment of ‘Ethiopian exceptionalism’ that was (and still remains) very strong in his home country, and to embrace a more Pan-African ideological stance.

He was one of the first Amharic-language writers, together with Kebbede Mik’ael, to tackle issues of black nationalism, decidedly inverting the prevalent isolationist stance of previous literary works. Mengistu’s poems often talk about racism with wit and sarcasm rather than indignation and anger. In a poem translated by the Poetry Translation Centre, he refers to himself in the UK as a t’ïkur ïngïda – a play on words between the literal meaning ‘black guest’ and its usage in Amharic to indicate an ‘unexpected guest’. The black/unexpected guest is always welcome in Ethiopia, not so much in the UK. Ironic, Mengistu remarks, considering that the UK built its wealth on the blackness of coal…

His sarcastic attitude towards racist stereotypes shows very clearly in one of the most famous anecdotes of his unfinished autobiography (published posthumously). Once he was hospitalized in London, and some white patients, intrigued by the presence of a black person in the ward, asked him when did he start wearing clothes: before getting on the plane to the UK? Mengistu is shocked at the question:

How could I answer such a stupid question? Where could I begin? How could one start talking about the rudiments of Ethiopian history? The Axum obelisks? St. Yared’s classical sacred chants? And all these at a time when Europeans used to cover themselves with mud and roam from forest to forest.

But then, he decides to mock the British patients in return:  yes, back home everyone is naked, he lied. Ethiopians are all animist and only eat raw meat and freshly-plucked fruits! As a student, he could only afford marrying four wives, but rich people marry hundreds of women! And when four Ethiopian girls, students of his, came to visit him in hospital, the nurse immediately thought they were his wives. Mengistu promptly confirmed, and received them amidst the astonishment of his ward-mates.

His work remains imbued by a strong sense of pride for Ethiopian history, whose value –and at times superiority– he never put in doubt. Mengistu was a prominent polemist in Ethiopia’s 1981-1983 debate over which literary language should be adopted by Ethiopian writers. He championed the literary use of Amharic over European languages – whose knowledge, diffusion and importance were (and still are) extremely limited in a non-colonised country such Ethiopia. His position, though, came across as ethno-centric. More than 80 languages are spoken in Ethiopia, remarked his opponent Sahle Sellassie Berhane-Mariam, and wouldn’t promoting Amharic over the others imply a form of Amhara cultural assimilationism? Mengistu responded in a conciliatory way: African-language writing should always be preferred, but at the same time writers are welcome to experiment with European languages, and encouraged to translate their works in English or French for the benefit of their fellow Africans.

He wrote over the theory of literature too, proposing in 1963 a first comprehensive categorization of Amharic metrical forms, and writing books about technical aspects of Amharic drama. He had a distinguished career as a civil servant, diplomat and professor in the Theatre Arts Department of Addis Ababa University.

In 1952 he wrote on The Lion Cub, a magazine for Ethiopian students in London: “our duty […] demands of us that we should not return merely ‘qualified’ but also armed with the best system of ideas – best, that is, for the Ethiopia of our time”. Mengistu’s work remained inspired by this sense of commitment even after the 1974 Revolution brought to power an authoritarian military regime. Of his later production, three plays stand out. The first is S’ärä Klonïyalist (“Anti-colonialist”, 1978-79), a patriotic drama set during the 1936-1941 Italian occupation of Ethiopia. In Bale-kaba ïnna bale-daba, (The Mighty and the Lowly, 1979) he condemns those foreign-educated Ethiopians that lived a luxurious life in their home country instead of becoming socially engaged in the struggle to improve it. Lastly, Shummïya (“Scramble for Office”, 1985) is a satire of the systematic corruption and embezzlement practices of Haile Selassie’s regime (but many saw a not-so-hidden reference to the military government as well).

Before dying in 1988, he reportedly said that he had two last desires: translating his father’s biography in English, to show foreign readers the richness and complexity of Ethiopian culture and history, and translating “Anti-colonialist” in Italian, to urge the Italians to finally start a public debate on their forgotten imperial history.  He did not live to see the fulfilment of either dream. “Anti-colonialist” was in fact translated in Italian, but only 5 years after his death. “The Book of Memories of Aleqa Lemma” remains untranslated, and maybe it is time somebody starts working on fulfilling Mengistu’s second dream.

Sara Marzagora is a PhD candidate at SOAS, University of London, researching Amharic literature and the history of Ethiopian political philosophy. She is translating into English some of Mengistu Lemma’s plays and poems as part of her doctoral research.

The next post in this series of writer profiles will appear in the next couple of months.

If you have any ideas for writers we should feature or would be interested in contributing a post please do leave a comment or contact us – we’d love to hear from you.

By AiW Guest Anneke Rautenbach.

Tom Wolfe, as early as 1973, spoke of a new form of writing that “consumes devices that happen to have originated with the novel and mixes them with every other technique known to prose. And all the while, quite beyond matters of technique, it enjoys an advantage so obvious, so built-in, one almost forgets what a power it has: the simple fact that the reader knows all this really happened.” Could he have imagined, then, South Africa forty years into the future? Could he have imagined that one of its most beloved icons, a record-breaking paraplegic Olympian whom they called the “Blade Runner”, would shoot his swimwear model girlfriend to death on Valentine’s Day morning of 2013?

Consider the elements of this story: “Bullet in the chamber”, Nike’s unfortunate campaign slogan, was on the day of the shooting still plastered on billboards above Johannesburg’s major highways, alongside a larger-than-life Pistorius running on his aluminium blades. Meanwhile, in Cape Town, the stage was set for President Jacob Zuma’s State of the Nation Address, two weeks after the grotesque rape and disembowelment of 17-year-old Anene Booysen, an event which called for greater state action against gender violence. Hours before the Pistorius disaster, the Daily Maverick had written that “the country is in distress after a series of crises that have undermined our very sense of nationhood and shaken the cornerstones on which our young democracy was built (…) The moment for Zuma to bring back hope is now.”

“You can’t make this stuff up,” it is often quipped in South Africa, but this story goes beyond mere tabloid gold. It is the stuff of Greek tragedy – the sheer extremity of the factors involved are operatic in their drama: the superhuman, Helenian beauty of the victim, a highly troubled nation as the setting, Valentine’s Day and the day of Zuma’s State of the Nation Address as the context – at its centre, an international, disabled hero and the hubris which led to his downfall.

When Wolfe wrote those words in 1973, he and his contemporaries had responded as newsroom underdogs to the power held then by ‘The Great American Novelist’. By merely messing about in the Sunday supplements (where creativity was free to flourish due to the miniscule likelihood that anyone would read their work), they were unwittingly developing a form that would eventually blindside the novelists to which they deemed themselves inferior – at least in the narration of New York in the 1960s. Forty years later in South Africa, we too seem to be turning towards narrative journalism, although less as plucky underdogs than from a sense of frustration at the underwhelming response in our art forms to an overwhelming mass of material in our immediate environment.

A lecturer in the English department of the university I attended put down his chalk one day and told us that, barring a few exceptions, South African poetry is doomed to be bad.  He explained that in South Africa, it is impossible to reconcile the “rapture”, the dumbfounding beauty of its landscape, with the “rupture” — its daily bloodshed and social traumas.  Whatever is expressed will always be overpowered by its glaring omissions. In South Africa, the equivalent of Wall Street suits, the gangsters of the Brazilian favellas and the malnourished and displaced of Somalia live side by side, jostling for space and resources. The economic strata cross on different planes and do not touch, except for the occasional crash in the form of crime. Most of us in that lecture theatre struggled to see, and to understand, the conflicting currents below us.

Yet in the contracted universe of South Africa we tend to be particularly vocal on matters of social and political significance, albeit because we are more often than not affected by those currents. Online, even as the privileged seek a little divergence and escapism on platforms like Facebook, stories of crime, corruption and strikes-turned-violent are regularly shared and tweeted, prompting yelps of left-wing sympathy and yawps of right-wing condemnation and anger. The Pistorius-saga prompted a particularly noisy ruckus of national self-reflection and analysis, as well as expressions of despair at the way the country is being portrayed internationally. On a superficial level this may seem healthy, but upon closer inspection, it is apparent that grassroots-level debate about the issues raised consists of throwaway hyperboles, tired old tropes and dialogue made impossible by people who keep missing each other in a country where experiences of the same place range from the sublime to the horrific. These intuitive and short-sighted utterances aim to dismiss exactly the historical and political complexity that resulted in their particular linguistic handicap.

This handicap, the tendency to fall into unhelpful, antagonistic extremes, is accounted for in a recent article in the New Statesman by Cape Town-based academic, Hedley Twidle, as a backlog of historically-generated anger and an inability to know who to blame. He suggests that because blame was not assigned when it should have been (as with the privileging of amnesty over justice during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example) it now circulates in South African discourse in the form of “excess current”, which, “in turn, is related to the problem of distinguishing between various kinds of critique, in separating the progressive from the reactionary”.

Whether in the outbursts on online forums, on in poetry, film or fiction – we appear to be stuck in an expressive rut, relying on rapturous catchphrases (“Proudly South African” being one of them) and motifs which, even as they express rupture and despair, are moralising and comfortably familiar. Traditional art forms are no longer sufficient in untangling the “excess current” that makes South African dialogue so loaded and, at times, impossible. On the literary landscape, the fiction generating the most excitement at present leans towards the generic — crime fiction especially. Whatever its merits, even if it is done well, genre fiction, by definition, trades in stereotypes and acts in favour of the status quo, which might account for at least some of its popularity.

An alternative expression of today’s realities in South Africa may lie somewhere in narratives – analytical yet inevitably personal, a combination of reportage and introspection – that have been spinning off in book form for quite some time.  Jonny Steinberg’s Midlands (2002), starting with the single unsolved murder of the son of a midlands farmer, moves outwards in an investigative and social exploration of historical tensions between farmers and their tenants in rural Kwazulu Natal, as well as the impossibility of neutral narration. Antony Altbeker’s Fruit of a Poisoned Tree (2010) takes as its subject the court case of actuary Fred van der Vyver, accused of bludgeoning to death his girlfriend, Stellenbosch student Inge Lotz in 2005. As the account progresses, it unfolds into an investigation of the shaky fundaments of forensic pathology and the fallibility of memory. Radio journalist Mandy Wiener’s Killing Kebble (2012) carries the reader through an action-packed account of the events leading up to and after the murder of mining magnate and modern-day Barney Barnato, Brett Kebble. It unravels the intricate networks of South Africa’s underworld – from Johannesburg’s Elite Bouncers to Eastern Europe’s exiled druglords, with shocking expositions about the country’s ruling class.

Unsurprisingly, book deals are lined up in preparation for the Pistorius-trial: Wiener is to collaborate with fellow Cape Talk Eyewitness News reporter Barry Bateman for Pan Macmillan’s Behind the Door: The Oscar and Reeva Story. Because of his finesse in the art of tweeting, Bateman’s Twitter following soared by 608% during the Pistorius bail hearing. Random House Struik’s Zebra Press will release No More Heroes by crime reporter Jacques Steenkamp and celebrity reporter Gavin Prins. Both works are set to appear following the conclusion of the trial.

Though their style may adopt some of the more saleable aspects of genre fiction, the generic hybridity of narrative non-fiction in South Africa – chronicles, case studies and true-crime, part investigation, part parable — seems to satisfy an urgency to understand the society from which these crimes are born, beyond what traditional journalism or academics can offer. The benefit lies in the youth of its form, its ability to absorb the rational and the irrational, its capacity for exploration which is simultaneously public and private, historical and political. This power — ultimately the power to arrive at conclusions, thereby enabling dialogue and the shifting of paradigms — should not be underestimated.

Girdled by the constrictions of the actual, creativity is allowed to thrive. With narrative non-fiction we are grounded, once more, with the weight of reality in all its subtlety and variation, and in South Africa we begin to reconcile our vastly different versions of it. As Janet Malcolm wrote in her account of true-crime, The Journalist and The Murderer: the writer of fiction is “master of his own house” and may do with it what he likes, while the writer of non-fiction is “only a renter, who must abide by the conditions of his lease, which stipulates that he leave the house – and its name is Actuality – as he found it.”

Anneke Rautenbach is a freelance journalist and writer based in Cape Town. In 2012 she completed her honours degree in English studies at the University of Cape Town and served as editor-in-chief of the university’s international affairs magazine, The Cape Town Globalist. In July 2013 she travelled to the UK to participate in the Writing South Africa Now colloquium held at the University of Cambridge. She hopes to pursue a master’s degree in 2014. 

By AiW Guest: Uche Peter Umez.

“Different writers in different locations at different times find their different reasons for writing.”

Afam Akeh

Interviewer’s Note: AFAM AKEH, the author of Stolen Moments (1988), has won prizes and other honours for his poems, short stories and journalism. He has years of editorial practice as a literary journalist – was Founding Editor of African Writing Online, and literary editor of the Nigerian Daily Times in the 1990s.

Currently based in Oxford, he has performed, broadcast and workshopped his poetry at literature events, the BBC and various UK school-related events and programmes, including a workshop event for the Oxford University Poetry Society. He was a mentor in the lottery-funded 2008 workshop between refugees and poets in the Oxford area, organised by Oxford Brookes University. See How I Land, an anthology of new writings, was published in 2009 from that project.

His writings may also be found at the online sites of Londonart, Sentinel Poetry, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement, African Writing Online, and Fieralingue at The Poet’s Corner. Akeh has served as a judge in national and charity-based poetry competitions, in Nigeria and the UK. He is working to establish African Poetry Village, an online home for Africanworld poetries. His latest collection, Letter Home & Biafran Nights, was published in December 2012 by Sentinal Poetry Movement Publishers, and was longlisted for the 2013 Nigeria Prize for Literature.

Uche Peter Umez: Your debut collection, Stolen Moments, was published in 1988 to critical acclaim. How come it took you nearly 24 years to publish a second collection?

Afam Akeh: That early career publication enabled by the grace of Odia Ofeimun and the Association of Nigerian Authors really came to me as a bonus. A number of us who were published then, and that would include the poet Uche Nduka, were having a lot of fun with poetry, reading voraciously and writing with just as much enthusiasm and excitement, but up to the time I left Nigeria in 1992 we were not quite in that kind of professional or vocational survival mode that puts such a high premium on publication. In the UK, I was for many years a Christian minister, planting Churches, returning to writing only around 2004. There was to be another decade of just feeling the secular ground beneath my feet, tuning into the emotional frequency for practice outside the Church, then re-learning practice, reading, reading and reading, even going back to school for an MA in Creative Writing. I was of course also writing all that time, and when I did finally commit to making a second book of poems it took several attempts to achieve that. This is the personal narrative but I could also answer this question differently, focusing on the generational story, examining why many of the Nigerian writers who began writing at the time I did have not published as many books as you would expect.

Uche Peter Umez: In the first poem from Letter Home & Biafran Nights,’Letter Home’, the four journeys summarize the experience of an immigrant, attesting to the ‘tyranny of memory’, and how the immigrant attempts to belong to a new ‘perch’. I find this poem so insuppressibly touching I am drawn to the stark sense of loss, longing, distance and absence that punctuate the life of an exile on the whole.  How long did you work on the four sequences in this poem?

Afam Akeh: Indeed there are four different narratives, four representative lives, in the poem but they all relate as one imagined exodus. You are right that there is a common thread of displacement in the narratives. However, there is also evidence of complexity in each of those experiences. It is about longing but more significantly about belonging, about rejection and acceptance. For the long removed it can also be about the management of emotional betrayal and fading memory. The original copy of the first movement in the poem ‘Letter Home’ was subtitled ‘in the fourteenth year’. That means it was started around 2006, fourteen years after 1992, when I left Nigeria. The final published form of the poem was completed in 2012. Six years then? Something like that.

Uche Peter Umez: There is almost a palpable sense of looking back in many of the poems in your collection. A masked feeling of nostalgia, the inexorable pull of memory. This image in the poem ‘Letter Home’ (pg 5) vividly captures this fact for me:
…the gecko
seeking warmth
behind shut doors
clambered
to its new perch,
dreaming of home
in another life.
The familiar dream
a constant lure…
How much of your ‘travel guilt’ still clings to you? Have you been unable to shed much of it?

Afam Akeh: Memory is not always friendly. I carry my immigrant travel guilt with me always – not in any disabling way, but in the sense that I am frequently reminded of it by daily encounters.  I am acutely aware that I am not alone in these paths taken, but have also committed my children and possibly their children. I frequently consider the consequences and possibilities, positives and negatives of this choice that was forced on me. The immigrant life is engaged with questions of home, land and country. This is the case even for people of a mixed race or mixed national background. They may conveniently roll with globalist perspectives but still have to deal with issues of longing and belonging. So there is that abiding travel guilt for the immigrant, but there are lots of welcome smiles in the present country to ease the burden, sometimes good news from the old country too. I find it helps also to remind myself that we are all just passing through even if we disagree on what happens afterwards, whether we all conclude in ethereal dissolution or head for a more substantial denouement. There is the potential for futility in that perspective but also the possibility of liberation, depending on how you engage it. In any case memory is quite selective in our “passing through” regarding the things of our past it wants to remain fiercely loyal to, or long for, or still belong to, the things it actually chooses to remember and how it chooses to remember those things. It is the case that memory not only remembers but also forgets – as in forget a once beloved face or language or land of origin and no longer care about or even know it, sometimes during a lifetime and sometimes after many generations.

Uche Peter Umez: Chenjerai Hove says, ‘Writers see, record and warn the nation about its human and general social conditions’. To what degree does your poetry collection reflect this vision, given that many of the poems reiterate the toll Diaspora exacts on the individual?

Afam Akeh: There is a lot to learn from what a writer says about writing, about how to write, etc, but never take only one writer’s word for it. There are as many ways of writing, as many reasons for writing, as there are writers. The statement you quote, useful as it is in the determination and evaluation of practice, also indicates the period concerns informing the familiar practice of Hove’s generation of African writers. Different writers in different locations at different times find their different reasons for writing. It is important to validate and respect difference in practice. I would like to hope that my work is open to difference in its concerns and interpretations. What was that cliché? Variety is the spice of life? Well, I like that spice in my poetry. This is the first collection I have made since taking up residence in a different country so it is heavily marked by my immigrant experience. There are two poems on the civil war, including the long poem ‘Biafran Nights’. But the collection also finds space for other subjects, for love and the creative process, for humour and the very joy of living.

Uche Peter Umez: Do you think your poetry in its attempt to ‘tell the human tale’ will rattle our national psyche against ‘nights that speak with clenched teeth’?

Afam Akeh: Do I set out to ‘tell the human tale’ in my work? I probably do, sometimes  to awaken consciousness and conscience as you indicate, but primarily to reveal that ‘human tale’ in all its sometimes befuddling complexity, the beauty within and its attending banality, that familiar brutality often masked or written out of poetry around where I live in the West, every voice heard, all images exposed, the human without cover. Yes, I believe in art that tells all there is to tell of the human tale. But there is also something known as the consolation of art. I believe in that too. Great art is able to reveal those “nights that speak with clenched teeth” which politics may ignore or not see, but then go beyond that duty of representation to bring beauty and melody and comfort to such disconsolate nights of clenched teeth.

Uche Peter Umez: In your poem, ‘The Living Poem’, the impression this reader gets is that poetry should be familiar: ‘Unbound/living free, in rhythm with the rocking streets….Poetry should be shaking hands with normal folk…’ Some people tend to view poems that exhibit straightforward clarity as ‘unpoetic’, while others extol as ‘poetic’ any poetry that seems to be mystifying and obfuscating. What’s your take on such a perspective?

Afam Akeh: Again, it would be a mistake to promote what I am saying in one poem about the qualities of a particular kind of poetry – public poetry – as advocacy for all of poetry practice. That poem was written in response to another promoted idea that poetry can only be made for the private leisure or study consumption of the individual reader, or that poetry always needs to be rendered in a knotty idiom requiring the expert interpretation of initiates. Each poet to his or her craft is what I say, but generally I don’t like to shut so many of my potential readers off my work by needlessly complicating language or meaning. ‘The Living Poem’ is simply stated because it is celebrating value in access, in the possibility of poems being available to all, even in non-scribal forms and other media. It is about poetry being valued as a communal practice, as it was in the beginning and still is in many traditional practices across the world, poetry also valuable as popular song or mediated by non-alphabet signs, images and other visual practices. Graphology as a poetry practice. Asemic poetry. Collage. Visual poetry. Sound poetry. Performance poetry. Film poetry. Name it and I’ll probably say yes and amen to it as a consumer of poetry. And, yes, I actually practice some of these other forms too as I will show in the near future. Poetry is the only art form that still feels embarrassed about developing its consumer base by investing in its more public and popular practices. Fiction does, and so do music and visual art. There was always elitism in some of the royal and priestly company poetry kept even in earlier times, but the exaltation of ‘difficulty’ in practice is actually historically recent, traceable only back to the approach to Western modernism, when an emphasis on publication and learning, combined to promote a highly literate kind of rigor in practice, with academic patronage becoming the paramount provider and judge of value, also radically affecting the way in which poems are received and consumed. Interpretation became a highly skilled art. This is a poetry orientation that is being challenged by the fierce immediacy of communication, and the ready availability of information, in the social media age. Easier online access not only means greater parity in the dissemination and reception of creative work, including poetry, but also greater consumer choice. Now we don’t have to read and value only the poems and poets the academy and its associated publishers allow in the bookshops, or interpret and honour as valuable. We are all now empowered as consumers to project our reader perspectives and proclaim value wherever we think we have found it out there. There is of course the downside to this in the greater prominence now given to mediocrity, with so many young writers masquerading as masters, but I think there is generally a fair balance between that and the kind of equally unacceptable situation we had in the past when literary gate-keepers were gods with the power of life and death over which poet or kind of poetry could be allowed access and honour.

Uche Peter Umez: Given the raw emotions that trailed the publication of There Was a Country by the late Chinua Achebe, don’t you think that the ‘Biafran Nights’ in your title collection would scrape anew sore wounds and memories? Would it not have been better for the poet to just keep his mouth shut, in times like this – to paraphrase W.B. Yeats?

Afam Akeh: Yeats? He was a man of many lives, as much the mystic as he was the materialist, sometimes in his words a man of love and peace but in life also at various times very much the quarrelsome warrior kind. He wrote political work and also held political office in Ireland, and he was not exactly known for keeping his mouth shut, whether as a poet or as a statesman. But your focus here is on the politics of my poem ‘Biafran Nights’. I have been told by well-meaning fellow writers that some people will feel unable to buy and support Letter Home and Biafran Nights because of its title and because of the long poem ‘Biafran Nights’ in it. Those telling me this are friends so they must mean well, but if it is really true that there are Nigerians still bitterly opposed to the mere mention of the name ‘Biafra’ more than four decades after the end of the civil war, then it is especially for them that my poem has been written. You don’t go through life pretending you did not have your difficult past. Well, you can, but that life of denial is damn costly, too full of unresolved conflicts and needless tension. You live such a life looking over your shoulders all the time, trusting no one. What my poem on the civil war says you do with a difficult past is, process it and then bury it with honour. That is probably what I am doing at a personal level by writing the things I have written about that difficult past, including this poem. Nigerians need to properly process and then bury all their difficult pasts, including Biafra. The difficult past can either be employed as a tool of development or be allowed to rage on as a weapon of conflict by which we keep accusing and fighting each other. We have to engage all that anger from the past in a reassuring process that will convince us we no longer need to distrust and fear each other. If indeed people lost their lives on both sides of the Biafran conflict trying to keep the dream of Nigeria alive or refusing to accept a Nigeria that could not guarantee their rights to life and livelihood, then this situation in which Nigeria is divided in all but name, and can guarantee neither life nor livelihood mocks all of us who lived through the war and lost our loved ones and fellow citizens. Their sacrificial deaths have been in vain because we are all still weaponed against each other, some more obviously militant than others. My poem ‘Biafran Nights’ originally opened with the words ‘There are nights that speak with clenched fist’. After a number of re-writes I changed that to ‘There are nights that speak with clenched teeth’. The difference as you must have noticed is in the changed words ‘fist’ and ‘teeth’. But that was really a cosmetic change allowed because I did not want a mere word to become a distraction to certain readers and affect understanding of the poem. In the end whatever meaning you choose to invest in ‘clenched fist’ can also be allowed for ‘clenched teeth’ but it is possibly easier and quicker to read a war-like stance in the former than in the later. But this poem is about a different kind of rage, a rage against frustration, helplessness, hopelessness, against the unbearable heaviness of watching our country fail to learn from the historic savagery of its civil war. This is why I begin the poem by narrating my memory of that historic savagery, lest we forget. In the last two movements of the poem, I shift emphasis from the Biafran war to begin a meditation on what to do with a difficult past, referencing the slave, colonial and apartheid histories of the black and African peoples. Achebe’s There Was A Country was a more detailed account of the Nigerian past I was dealing with in my poem, but I believe that in writing that book he had the same sense of dismay with the Nigeria project that informs my poem, perhaps in his case a degree of bitterness too because he did carry a greater burden of our unresolved history than I do. However, if you are looking for Nigerian poetry which is really similar to Achebe’s memoir in the sense that it directly identifies some principal actors of our conflicted history and then proceeds to make controversial comments about them, you need to look into J. P. Clark’s poetic sequence on the crises in Casualties (1970).

Uche Peter Umez: There are always authors whom we admire or from whom we draw influence. Are there particular authors who have meant a great deal to you since you started writing poetry?

Afam Akeh: Let us just give thanks to some of those who were there at the beginning because it gets quite crowded after that.  It was profiting to have Niyi Osundare (poetry) and Isidore Okpewho (fiction) as foundational teachers in undergraduate writing classes at the University of Ibadan. Still at Ibadan, I drew inspiration from the great crowd of aesthetes who were part of the Poetry Club, but Harry Garuba was the life force of those heady days. It was a very easy life of bukas, booze and books, exquisite words perfectly deployed, and, yes, women too. They were there but it was mostly boys’ company.  After graduation, I moved to Lagos to work in journalism and found in Odia Ofeimun a generous mentor. I still have a book or two borrowed from his live-in library more than two decades ago. I read whatever came my way but frequently returned to work by Christopher Okigbo, T.S Eliot, Derek Walcott, Denis Brutus, two particular early collections by the Canadian poet Tom Marshall (The Silences of Fire, 1969) and the British poet David Harsent (After Dark, 1973), some of the poets of European (including Russian) modernism, and the Latin American poets Pablo Neruda and Cesar Vallejo. I also found Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath intriguing.

Uche Peter Umez: Finally, internet has made poetry much more accessible as never before. What is your reaction to the current proliferation of poetry in Nigeria? Do you have any advice for up and coming poets who might be working on their debut collections?

Afam Akeh: I have already indicated my support for new media and the publishing and promotional access it allows writers, especially new writers. I have also noted the dubious value of work some young writers allow to represent them online. Once you put these things out there they are not so easy to hide when you no longer feel proud of them. I still belong to one or two writing groups. They are not just there to tell you how to write. They offer a ready support network for your career too, so if you are still working on your debut collection use these groups to workshop your material. Use available friends too. Whatever you do be careful about throwing new work all over the place online merely to show you are working or just because someone asked for them. Some of us have learned the hard way. Be calculating in the use of media and in giving out your work. Whatever work you allow online should be linked to some beneficial career purpose, especially if it is new work you are risking in that way. I think that in the developing world we cannot reject self-publishing. Poetry is not quite like the novel, with its large network of publishers and agents hunting for the next big thing. Much of the poetry in the world is achieved through some degree of writer familiarity with the usually small or independent publisher, and that includes the work of major poets in any part of the world. It is important, however, to recognize that unlike fiction where it is easy to build or rescue your reputation with one outstanding novel, the smell of bad poetry hangs around for a long time and once it is generally felt by the community that your poems have a stinking fish smell it is hard work getting folks to change their mind. Having said all that, your information that there is a ‘proliferation’ of poetry in Nigeria comes to me as good news. It gives me great pleasure to see that even now in Nigeria there is an identifiable poetic generation after mine, developing their craft and ensuring there is a continuing narrative of excellence for Nigerian poetry. Let a thousand poems be written is what I say. Every poem will find its level and every poet his or her interested public. You can always build career success from the support of an interested public if you are willing to take the criticisms and challenges, change what needs to be changed, and then work at becoming the outstanding poet you want to be.

Uche Peter Umez is a poet and short fiction writer. An Alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), Uche has participated in residencies in Ghana, India, Switzerland and Italy. He was one of the winners in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and has twice been shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2007 and 2011. His latest children’s book Tim the Monkey and Other Stories has just been published by Africana First Publishers, Nigeria.

AiW guest James Smith.

Nina Munk’s The Idealist: Jeffery Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty (Random House) isn’t a book only about Jeffery Sachs. It’s a book about the world as we would like it to be, an uncomfortable mix of our dreams, and our disappointments. It traces the optimism of development – of aid – as a force that can shape communities, societies, entire countries, into a facsimile of a vision of the future. It’s a story of unproblematic emulation, some emancipation, and quite a bit of Empire.

More than that it’s a story of the slow burn of realisation, as Munk sees the local crumbling of a global project, and in the process loses some of her idealism regarding Jeff Sachs. There is no doubt that Sachs is a force of nature. One of the world’s leading development economists, he has played a pivotal role in shaping the architecture of development: the international institutions, liberal values and macroeconomic levers that would shape tracts of the ‘less developed’ world, and especially Africa. His prescription of economic ‘adjustment’ of cutting the costs of government, balancing books and promoting growth were implemented firstly in Eastern Europe and latterly across swathes of Africa. The results were mixed, to put it mildly, and when they were particularly patchy, as in Poland in the late 80s, they were dismissed as the consequences of having not fully bought into the project, of not having ‘adjusted’ enough. It was a failure of implementation, not of vision. This macroscopic, macroeconomic view of development has been much critiqued, but yet in many respects ‘adjustment’ is still the first-line treatment for economic failure.

Witness Greece. The problem with much aid and intervention is that there is no retrospect, only prospect.

And there is no doubt that Jeff Sachs was a prospect. PhD, professorship and power and influence followed in quick succession. He has worked tirelessly for decades to help the world’s poor, and relentlessly to remind those lucky enough not to be poor that they were not only lucky, but also responsible. And one of the great attractions of Sachs’ vision was that he sold an easy responsibility. All it would take was money, a lot of money admittedly, but not so much in the greater scheme of things: doing without the odd nuclear submarine or two. This money would feed largely technocratic solutions: infrastructure, clinics, schools. At some point Sachs had an epiphany when directly confronted by extreme poverty (documented in his autobiography), moving swiftly from the macro of state austerity and fiscal responsibility to the micro of packages of direct intervention.

This isn’t really explored in depth in the Idealist, nor is the problematisation of responsibility, namely who accepts it and what are the implications of doing so that will inevitably follow. I will come back to that.

Munk has written an unusual book in some ways. It is just about the only major development biography. I suppose development practitioners are just not famous enough. There are many autobiographical accounts of development, notably Sachs’ own The End of Poverty (Penguin, 2005), which rehearses much of what Munk goes on to expose in her book. Rather less optimistically, Paul Theroux’s  (2002) transcribes his own prejudices of his youth as a Peace Corps volunteer onto every development practitioner he meets, or doesn’t meet because they won’t stop to give him a lift.

There are some interesting fictionalised memoirs, Tony D’Souza’s Whiteman (Portobello, 2005) is compelling and rings true. There are some brilliant academic texts, Easterly’s The White Man’s Burden (Penguin, 2006), Scott’s Seeing Like a State (Yale, 1999), Ferguson’s Anti-Politics Machine (Minnesota, 1994) or Mosse’s Cultivating Development (Pluto, 2006), any or all of which explain why ideas like Millennium Villages gain momentum much better than I can here. Novels about development, and films, are generally best avoided.   

The embodiment of Sach’s technocratic, interventionalist philosophy forms the central narrative of Munk’s book. In 2006, Sachs launched the Millennium Villages Project, an African living laboratory of development. A dozen villages in 10 African countries were selected to be pilot ‘Millennium Villages’. The vision was to eliminate poverty in these villages one intervention at a time, clinic by clinic, vaccine by vaccine, mosquito net by mosquito net. The initial cost was upwards of $10 million per village, raised solely by Sachs’ enthusiasm and belief, matched by generous benefaction: $50 million alone from George Soros. Once each village had demonstrated how packages of interventions not only eliminated poverty, but segued into sustainability, the programme would inevitably roll across Africa, point proved.

Munk dubbed the Project a sort of “MTV…. Extreme Village Makeover”. Slick, but invariably superficial, and ultimately a little embarrassing. Munk invested time in repeatedly visiting two of the Project’s villages, Dertu in northern Kenya and Ruhiira in southwestern Uganda. In true experimental style each of the 12 villages demonstrated different dimensions of hopelessness, too dry, too far away, too mosquito-infested, too politically unstable. What she found was no water, no markets, and indifferent politicians. These are not in themselves unexpected occurrences. My own doctoral thesis is replete with de rigueur photographs of failed boreholes along the Botswana border.

The problem was the compound nature of the failures. In Ruhiira, water pumps failed rendering boreholes useless, attempts to pipe water proved fruitless, generous donations of pipework from the US were difficult to transport there and when they did, they did not connect up to their African equivalents, donkeys were too exhausted to carry water up and down hillsides. Efforts to modernise agriculture improved yields but left unmarketable surpluses, there was no market and never had been a prospect of a market. Endless cost overruns made alternatives difficult to implement. The project managers worked tirelessly, to formulate business plans, to engage with the villagers, to solve endless problems, but to no avail.

Towards the end of the book there is a sense of dreams fraying around the edges, in relation to Dertu of increasingly urgent requests to reformulate ‘interventions’ as ‘enterprises’, of the drafting of business plans for whom there is no investor, of dreaming up ‘value-added’ products for far off markets, of development for which there can be no sustainability. These external requests become increasingly distant and erratic, while responsibility seems to become inevitably local.

Sachs comes across as relatively unbowed if increasingly agitated, briskly searching for new investment, and indeed the Millennium Village Project lingers to this day. There are more villages now, and more investors, although not quite of the same scale as before. The Project rhetoric has been significantly scaled back. And really, it is difficult to say the Villages were a complete failure. There was nothing to compare them to, no control for evaluation. There is no doubt that the lives of villagers were improved, more children went to school, more families had access to clinics, and agricultural productivity was enhanced. Yet, these are trends that one could see across Africa. There was no means to evaluate the true impact of the massive effort and investment in Millennium Villages, against the general continental trend. One is left only with the certainty that any sustainable development will be the coupling of political freedom with the growth of local, bottom-up economic activity. The Millennium Villages occupy a space in between, useful, but not ubiquitous.

So evidence of success is thin, but evidence is not so important if one simply believes. Munk leaves us with the abiding impression that Jeff Sachs is not a man to waste time reflecting on the past, instead he looks to the next, bigger challenge. This brings me back to the issue of responsibility – and particularly its divisibility. We might think in terms of easy responsibility, the policy idea, the online donation, the glib proclamation, the unfulfilled promise, as only for the West. Likewise, deep responsibility, the pressures of project implementation, the fallout of the halving of state expenditure, of facing impossible household decisions about who eats or receives medicine and who does not, of self-sacrifice, is for ‘the rest’. The former cannot fix the latter, and should not dictate to it.

It seems to me that we need to accept a more fluid notion of responsibility. If we create a policy idea then we are at least in part responsible for its implementation and implications. Its failure is ours. If we are lucky enough to be able to afford to make a donation, we should reflect on the historical trajectory that gave us that possibility. History is important, and we need to draw on the insight of retrospect if we are to understand underdevelopment and development. Underdevelopment is not the absence of a Millennium Village Project, it’s the deeply historical interplay between politics, power, resources and opportunity. That’s not to a say a Millennium Village Project might not be welcome, but it must be backed up with an engagement with the roots of underdevelopment. Deep responsibility beckons.

One inevitable theme in Munk’s book is the need to temper hubris with humility. A degree of introspection is good, even if one has set out to do nothing less than change the world. It would be very easy to see Munk’s book as a story of Sachs alone, as a parable of one man’s hubris, as a confession by proxy. Sachs could bring his undoubted talents to achieve what he did because his solutions are the ones we want, the easy ones. Development offers solutions to seemingly intractable problems, aid offers political leverage, there are idealists who want to contribute to a better world, interventions are certainly necessary and moral, and the people most in need do not have the power to negotiate what they want.

It is easy to slip into talking of a vague ‘we’ regarding our role in all this. If Sachs’ story is the story of trying to make the modern world it’s a story of all of us, politician, aid worker, entrepreneur, citizen: north and south, to a greater or lesser extent. It’s a story of embracing the realities of deep responsibility and rejecting the seductive power of easy answers.

Extracts from Nina Munk’s book are available at The Huffington Post.

James is Professor of African and Development Studies and Assistant Principal of Global Development at the University of Edinburgh. He has studied, worked and lurked in (mainly South) Africa for almost 20 years, most recently on things like tsetse flies, sleeping sickness and alternative forms of energy. His publications – include Science, Technology and Development and Biofuels and the Globalization of Risk (both Zed Books).

@jrsmith73

By AiW Guest: Steffan Horowitz

The latest issue (August 2013) of Chimurenga’s quarterly pan-African gazette, the Chronic, and its accompanying Chronic Books magazine are now available in print or for download. It features contributions from the likes of Akin Adesokan, Fred Moten, Rustum Kozain, Paula Akugizibwe, Stacy Hardy, Jon Soske, Tolu Ogunlesi, Binyavanga Wainaina, and Aryan Kaganof, among others. Topics covered in the issue range from the need for black writers to write about sex, recent developments among the new generation of South African jazz musicians, the inner workings of the African Union, and Kenya’s recent presidential election (the first since the post election violence of 2007), to Roger Federer’s forehand technique, the politics of and confusion caused by the two Benin Biénnales, and everything in between.

The stated mission of the Chronic is to give “voice to all aspects of life on the continent” and to celebrate “our capacity to continually produce something bold, beautiful and full of humour.” There is certainly something bold in Chimurenga’s gazette and the works included in this latest issue are truly eclectic (though there is a loose organizing logic). As with any undertaking of this magnitude, the quality and ability of the individual works contained within the Chronic’s pages to hold the reader’s attention can be understandably hit-or-miss.  For those pieces that struggle to keep the reader engaged, it is most often an issue of the sense of incompleteness or fragmentation conveyed by a work-in-progress. This is to be expected, with the publication acting as a series of experimental vignettes and elegant meditations, rather than comprehensive analysis.

Some of the highlights of this issue include Kangsen Feka Wakai’s “A Political Economy of Noise,” Stacy Hardy’s “Love and Learning Under the World Bank,” Tony Mochama’s “Close Encounters at the Florida 1000,” as well as the majority of the contents of the Chronic Books supplement. The brief article, “A Political Economy of Noise” recounts the unique path taken by Mozambique’s second president, Joaquim Alberto Chissano, out of Samora Machel’s hefty shadow and into the history books as one of post-independence Africa’s quirkiest statesmen.  In an exceptional manner, Wakai playfully sets the scene, placing Chissano’s story and career in the context of the actions of other fabled ‘Big Men’, global political and economic events, and various cultural phenomena of the day. We learn of the man’s fondness for transcendental meditation, his successful negotiation of a peace treaty with Renamo to end the Mozambican Civil War, and his bold choice to step down after two terms as president.

In “Love and Learning Under the World Bank,” Stacy Hardy manages to cobble together seventeen brief stories to create a contiguous historical narrative of the impact of structural adjustments and associated policies on African university systems and the resulting strategies, figures, and hierarchies that have emerged in the years since the early 1980s. Meanwhile, Tony Mochama’s “Close Encounters at the Florida 1000” takes up the author’s experience at a Nairobi nightclub popular with tourists and expats wherein perverse and otherworldly forms of sexual politics play themselves out on a nightly basis.

Ultimately, it is the Chronic Books that accompanies this issue of the Chronic that stands out most to me. The supplement, entitled “How To Be A Nigerian,” consists of a number of letters, interviews, book reviews, short essays and works of creative writing (most of which concern Nigerian literature and society). The conversations taking place within these pages are engaging, informative, and important. With a number of humorous updates of Peter Enahoro’s classic 1960s series, How To Be A Nigerian, the supplement is at once playful and deeply relevant. From the very beginning, Yemisi Ogbe provides readers with a biting and powerful critique of Chimamanda Adichie’s hitherto untouchable novel, Americanah – daring to discuss many of the problems and flaws that some of us (myself included) had with the novel, but rarely articulated.

My appreciation of such a review may simply stem from the fact that it acts as validation of my own opinion. However, the same cannot be said for Akin Adesokan’s letter from Lagos, “A Corpse and its Jurisdiction.” Adesokan’s Kafka-esque account of trying to report the presence of a human corpse on the median of a major Lagosian carriageway to the proper authorities is as much delightful and funny as it is tragic and telling. And the same can be said of many of the pieces contained within the August 2013 issue of the Chronic.

Steffan Horowitz is a regular contributor to the popular African media and culture blog, Africa is a Country. He received his MA in African Studies from Indiana University, where he focused on South African urbanism, youth, and cultural studies. He is currently based in New York City.

http://www.chimurenga.co.za/product-category/shop-items/the-chronic

For more info. on the first edition of the Chronic: ‘The Chimurenga Chronic, now-now – first print issue of pan-African gazette’

Africa in Words Guest: Gavin Brown.

“Surround the Embassy”, 16 June 1988
(Photo credit: Jon Kempster)

When I set out to research the history of the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy in London, I knew I could trace enough former participants in that protest to make the project viable. I expected that many of these former activists would have kept their own modest archives of papers and ephemera from their anti-apartheid campaigning in the late 1980s. I knew I would be able to piece together other fragments of the story from the archives of the British Anti-Apartheid Movement, and from papers deposited in South Africa. What I didn’t anticipate was that we would discover that, in 1994, when the City of London Anti-Apartheid Group (who organised the Non-Stop Picket) ceased to exist, the entire contents of their office had been packed away and stored privately, gathering dust, ever since.

Here I probably need to give a little bit of context. The City of London Anti-Apartheid Group (City Group) was formed in 1982 by Norma Kitson, an exiled South African, her children, and supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Group. From the beginning the group regularly held protests outside the South African Embassy in London’s Trafalgar Square. In those early days, the group was recognised as a local group of the national Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM). But, before long, Norma Kitson found herself in trouble with the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC) in London; and relations between City Group and the AAM rapidly deteriorated. By the time the Non-Stop Picket was launched in April 1986, City Group had been ‘disaffiliated’ from the national movement. While City Group never stopped offering solidarity and support to the ANC; once outside the AAM, the group developed a close working relationship with exiled members of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and Black Consciousness supporters. As a result, the City Group archive provides an opportunity to understand a different perspective on the international anti-apartheid movement.

David Kitson speaks (Photo credit: Jon Kempster)

David Kitson, Norma’s husband, had been imprisoned in South Africa for his role in the second national High Command of Umkhonto we Siswe. He became one of the longest serving white political prisoners in apartheid-era South Africa. One of City Group’s earliest successes was an 86-day continuous protest outside the South African embassy which resulted in David Kitson and his comrades being moved off Death Row in Pretoria. Unfortunately, by the time David was released from gaol in 1984, Norma had become too much of a thorn in the side of the London ANC. David was forced to choose between his family and his loyalty to the ANC and South African Communist Party. He stood with Norma, but it cost him his SACP membership and the fellowship he had been promised at Ruskin College, Oxford, funded by his union, TASS (now part of Unite).

The documents in the archive reveal much about how Stalinists within the British trade union bureaucracy uncritically followed the line of their allies in the South African party. They actively ostracized those anti-apartheid stalwarts, like Kitson, with whom they had political disagreements and who they could not control. Genevieve Klein (2009) has demonstrated those political prisoners and detainees whose allegiance to the ANC could not be guaranteed found themselves marginalised and often had to find support from other sources. This often led them to those smaller solidarity groups, like City Group who had good working relationships with the exiled structures of the PAC and Black Consciousness Movement.

City Group and the Non-Stop Picket played a leading role in building many solidarity campaigns for South African activists   who could not rely on the international support of the ANC and its allies. The archive offers insights into the development and functioning of the campaigns for people like the Upington 14 who faced execution in South Africa under the common purpose doctrine for having participated in a protest that resulted in the death of a local official considered by many to be a stooge of the apartheid regime. City Group also campaigned for the detained trade union leader and community activist Moses Mayekiso. Although he would later become an ANC minister in the post-apartheid government, at the time, the ANC were not keen for him to be the focus of a major international campaign. In addition to the specifics of these campaigns, the archive reveals much about how the PAC and Black Consciousness Movement functioned in exile in the last years of apartheid – a story that has yet to be adequately told.

At present, the City Group archive remains in private hands and is not open to the public. My colleague, Helen Yaffe, and I are working with its current custodians to find an appropriate public archive where the papers can find a long-term home as a resource for all those interested in the history of anti-apartheid campaigning.

Gavin teaches social and cultural geography at the University of Leicester. His research on the Non-Stop Picket of the South African Embassy has been funded by the Leverhulme Trust.  You can find more stories from the Non-Stop Picket on his blog  and follow him @lestageog

Earlier in the year Africa in Words editors and authors attended Africa Writes 2013 in London.  This literature and book festival organized by the Royal African Society hosted some of the most exciting names in contemporary African literature at the British Library for readings and panel discussions ranging across topics from new directions in African writing, to literary prizes, to the role of non-fiction, to digital futures.

We were keen for Africa in Words to document and reflect on the festival, and for some of the conversations that took place to continue and reach a broader audience.  With that in mind we are delighted to be sharing a guest post by Emma Shercliff, reviewing a panel which focused on digital futures and the changing landscape of African publishing.  Emma’s post not only gives an insight into the presentations given by each speaker, adding links to some of the important digital initiatives they highlighted, it builds on her own experiences of working in digital publishing and researching the African publishing industry to respond and reflect on the possibilities for the future of digital publishing in Africa.

AiW Guest Emma Shercliff 

Panel discussion with Elizabeth Wood (Director of Digital Publishing and Mobile Platforms, World Reader), Lynette Lisk (Commissioning Editor, Pearson Education), Simi Dosekun (Former Managing Editor, Kachifo Limited), Michael Bhaskar (Digital Publishing Director, Profile Books). Chaired by Mary Jay (Consultant/Former Director, African Books Collective).

This session on African publishing began with an informative overview of the global digital publishing landscape, presented by Michael Bhasker of Profile Books. Bhasker pointed to the different paths that digital publishing has taken in markets as diverse as the US, continental Europe, China and Japan, using the example of Japanese ‘keitai literature’ – novels written on and for mobile phones – to illustrate how new models are overtaking traditional book publishing as a means of storytelling, and creating major alternative revenue streams. 

Panelists left to right: Michael Bhaskar, Elizabeth Wood, Mary Jay, Lynette Lisk & Simi Dosekun.

Lynette Lisk then offered a snapshot of her role at Pearson, where she commissions both fiction and educational material for East and West Africa.  Lisk commented on the changes that digital technologies have made to her daily working life; she now receives the majority of manuscripts submissions via email and can instantly exchange editorial and artwork files with colleagues in Africa. Lisk was careful to highlight the major gap between what is technologically possible and the reality on the ground. She cited included low income, poor internet connectivity, absence of secure payment systems, piracy and a lack of teacher training in digital products as particular problems. Lisk noted that many schools she visited on a recent trip to Lagos did not have reliable electricity supplies and that there was a vast divide between the private and government schools. Lisk referred to Pearson’s current project to digitise the iconic African Writers Series as both ‘exciting and challenging’. Whilst providing a platform for new African writers to share their writing, it has not been possible to convert some of the most popular titles due to the lack of ebook rights. Lisk also mentioned that she had been disappointed by the quality of self-published manuscripts she had received, a theme that was to recur later in the session. This was a refreshingly honest assessment of the opportunities and challenges faced when publishing for the African market.

Elizabeth Wood gave a presentation about World Reader, a non-profit initiative founded by ex-Amazon.com executive David Risher and marketing director Colin McElwee in 2010, with the aim of distributing ebooks in developing countries via eReaders and mobile phones. Wood began by stating that ‘our mission is to make sure that every man, woman and child on the planet has access to the books they need, to learn to read, to become literate, and to fall in love with books and fall in love with reading’. I must admit that the skeptic within me was wincing at the altruism of this aim, not least because Wood’s mention of Kenyatta’s campaign promise to ‘put a computer in the hands of every first grader in Kenya’ reminded me of the early days of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. However, unlike OLPC, which has been much criticised for its high-handed approach, Wood showed sensitivity when describing her work with African partners and with publishers. Particularly encouraging was her focus on the importance of providing relevant local content and the need to build sustainable revenue streams for African authors and publishers. Each eReader (an Amazon Kindle) is loaded with hundreds of storybooks donated by international authors, but WorldReader also works with publishers to provide African language titles and to digitise local materials, such as government textbooks. Importantly, the locally authored content is paid for, with authors receiving fees on a royalty basis. The statistics are impressive: WorldReader’s website states that, as of September 2013 they have put over 721,129 ebooks into the hands of 12,381 children in nine African countries.

Feeling Wood’s portrayal was slightly too good to be true. I asked about a report I had read on the WorldReader website that over 40% of the eReaders in a pilot in Ghana had broken during the trial. Wood replied that this had been a big unforeseen problem, but that the broken devices had been replaced, and Amazon had designed a new way of reinforcing the screen. A combination of product design changes, the addition of rubberised skins to the devices and student and teacher training had reduced breakages to about 3%. Wood emphasised the importance of training (another contrast to OLPC, whose ‘give-a-kid-a-laptop-and-walk-away’ approach has been widely discredited), stating that some of the initial breakages had occurred by pupils sitting on the devices with the aim of keeping them safe! User feedback appears to be taken seriously and the baseline research and pilot reports suggest that WorldReader is paying considerable attention to the monitoring and evaluation of their initiatives, which will be vital to measure the impact of the project on literacy levels.

Finally, Simi Dosekun, formerly Managing Editor at Nigerian publisher Kachifo Ltd. (and whose own children’s book, Beem Explores Africa, is amongst those provided on the WorldReader) gave an update on digital initiatives in Nigeria. Dosekun mentioned Okadabooks, a platform on which authors can self-publish their stories and from which readers can download stories to Android devices. The name reflects the okada motorcycles that navigate Nigeria’s busy streets, with its founder wishing to provide a ‘cheaper, faster and more flexible alternative to conventional means of transportation’, bypassing the ‘traffic jam’ caused by poor distribution and high printing costs of traditional books. Authors send in an electronic (jpeg) version of their story and, if approved, it is published (with no revisions) to the Okada platform. Books cost between N75 (30p) and N375 (£1.45), with authors taking a 50% royalty on all sales. Okadabooks provides an innovative model, and undoubtably will help provide visibility to authors, but does raise the issue of editorial quality control. Dosekun also described a pilot taking place in Osun state, where the state governor was planning to give out 150,000 tablets pre-loaded with educational content to senior secondary school students. I researched this a little further: the Opon Imo initiative was launched in May 2013 by Governor Aregbesola. Each tablet is pre-installed with a virtual learning environment containing an e-book library, video tutorials, lesson notes and exam papers for the core subjects in the West African School Leaving Certificate Exam. Although both praised and criticized within Nigeria, this initiative provides groundbreaking example and it is hoped that publishers working directly with the state government will significantly reduce problems of distribution and piracy. My one serious reservation is the governor’s claim that he will save 50 billion naira ($314m) by using electronic tablets rather than printed books. Having managed a digital publishing unit, I would argue that although physical printing and distribution costs are indeed saved, the expense of technical development, hosting, bug fixes, digital rights management, platform maintenance and training, as well as editorial and production costs, should not be underestimated. The potential impact on educational attainment, as well as costs, of the Opon Imo initiative – like the eLimu project in Kenyan primary schools – will be fascinating to watch over the coming years. Dosekun’s examples of home-grown African digital ventures provided a welcome balance to the accounts of the initiatives which UK and US-based publishers and NGOs are taking to Africa.

As Chair Mary Jay summarised, the two overarching themes running throughout the presentations were new business models and quality control. Michael Bhaskar stated that UK publishers have allowed themselves to be completely dominated by the large West Coast platforms and suggested that the challenge is for African entrepreneurs to build digital publishing networks themselves, before Amazon or Google arrive. There are opportunities for African developers – but the time to act is now. The panelists concluded that digital technologies do democratise publishing to some degree, but Bhasker argued that in an era when huge amounts of self-published content are being created, the value of the publisher is greater than ever. Members of the audience voiced concern that this might mean publishers continuing to exert too much control over what is published. However, as Dosekun pointed out, who wants to read a story full of errors?

Perhaps inevitably, given the short timeframe of the session, there was no time to discuss many of the other exciting digital initiatives taking place across the continent. There is little doubt that platforms and apps such as 3Bute, eKitabu and Paperight  are revolutionising the way that fiction is produced and consumed within Africa. Ventures such as The Kwani? Manuscript Project and Short Story Day Africa are administered entirely online; successful business models – such as the print-on-demand model developed by the African Books Collective – are already being used to distribute the work of African writers within the continent and internationally, and to keep books in print. Although lack of access to credit cards and secure payment systems remain challenges, digital initiatives are already starting to increase readership, and the fact that African consumers are using the mobile devices already in their pockets rather than waiting for the technology to arrive is the revolutionary factor. Problems that have bedeviled the African publishing industry for decades – poor road distribution networks, high printing costs, customs and trade barriers, the dominance of the large multinational publishers, territorial rights – are rendered irrelevant in a digital world. Local language publishing becomes a real possibility without the need for a minimum print run or warehousing facilities. Sales data can be instantly collected online, and authors appropriately compensated. This is a hugely optimistic time for African writers, readers and publishers. Reliance on donor funding has skewed the indigenous publishing infrastructure within Africa to the point where the whole industry revolves around lucrative textbook contracts (a 1999 APNET study estimated that over 95% of the publishing on the continent is educational). However, if projects such as WorldReader or Okadabooks can open up genuinely new distribution channels for literature within Africa, then a sustainable literary publishing sector could be built.

Ultimately, the real test of digital technology is the impact it makes on the lives of individuals. When undertaking research at the Archives of British Publishing & Printing earlier this year, I came across a handwritten letter from two Tanzanian schoolgirls, dated February 1989. The girls, named Sofia and Anna, had written to Heinemann asking to how they could get hold of books in the African Writers Series. Their note, asking the publisher to send a list of ‘all the books you sell at any level’ and ‘to tell us the echanging rate in shillings and of dollars also how much if we want to pay in pounds’ perfectly illustrates the difficulties of procuring literature, particularly literature in English, in Africa in the late 1980s. Contrast that with the story Elizabeth Wood related, of a young reader in Africa today (she didn’t name the country). A young woman tweeted that she had finished reading My Guy by Chuma Nwokolo on WorldReader. Wood replied that there was another story by the same author on the platform. The young woman asked for the name of the title, which Wood supplied: Gluttony. Six minutes later the reader tweeted ‘I’m reading Gluttony on WorldReader’. What a tantalising glimpse of Africa’s digital future.

Emma Shercliff holds an MA in International Development & Education from the Institute of Education (University of London) and will be beginning a PhD in 2014. Her research focuses on the role and contribution of women within the African publishing industry. She was formerly Managing Director of Macmillan English Campus, a digital publishing division of Macmillan Publishers. She is the Vice-Chair of World Computer Exchange, a global education and environmental non-profit which aims to connect young people in developing countries to the skills, opportunities and understanding of the Internet. She will be based in Abuja from January 2014.

by AiW Guest Jürg Schneider

Picture of unidentified woman by Augustus Washington [1855], from http://www.loc.gov/

The impression a casual observer might get of African photography and photographers being neglected by, invisible for, or even consciously secluded from public view until most recently is not entirely accurate and requires a more precise analysis. African photography has, in fact, always been international in the sense that photographs taken by African photographers have circulated quite early internationally, between continents, in different media and materialities, and over long periods of time. Indeed, photographic images and the veracity they represented according to general perception were too powerful as to be ignored by the forces working on imaginaries of Africa. It is therefore no wonder that photographs played an important role in colonization and missionary print culture. One of the earliest photographers in West Africa, Augustus Washington, an African American daguerreotypist who had moved from Hartford, Connecticut to Liberia in the early 1850s, produced a series of images which were subsequently used by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in their publications. The ACS, however, was only one of many European and US-American philanthropic and missionary societies active in Africa which used photography as a means of communication with their respective publics and stakeholders. The same is true for colonial administrations which also called on photographic images to document the achievements made and also, in some instances, to justify their costly presence on-the-spot.

River beach in Gabon, 1871 (circa) by Francis W. Joaque, from http://www.britishmuseum.org/

In the mid-1870s, Francis W. Joaque, one of the earliest African photographers, took a series of 14 photographs in Santa Isabel, Fernando Po’s capital, on behalf of the Spanish governor Diego Santisteban in order to bear visual and hence truthful evidence of the Spanish possession’s wealth and its inhabitant’s interest in the economic development of the island. Some years earlier, John Parkes Decker had, commissioned by the British governor and the Colonial Office in London, documented buildings and places in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Copies of many of these images subsequently appeared in other collections, for instance in the Photo Specimen Book of the British Missionary Leaves Association or the albums of Carl Passavant, a Swiss medical doctor who had traveled in West and Central Africa in the 1880s buying photographs here and there from local photographers. Joaque’s photographs were also shown at colonial exhibitions in Gabon and Paris in 1887 and 1900 respectively. Furthermore, his photographs were reproduced in travelogues and illustrated newspapers which appeared in France, Spain, and Great Britain.

On the other hand, in the context of migratory movements of Africans, on the continent but also between Africa, Europe and the Americas which gained momentum in the second half of the 19^th century resulting in deterritorialized social ties, photographs had an important role to play in what can be termed (referring to Anthony Giddens) as “facework between absentees”. Consequently, photo studios did not only keep in stock a variety of photographs for casual customers, such as explorers and travelers on their way further down the coast whose likes and dislikes they tried to anticipate, photographers also had to meet local customers’ orders for portraits which they wanted to send to friends and relatives abroad. “Card portraits”, wrote the Bostonian Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1863, “as everybody knows, have become the social currency, the sentimental ‘green-backs’ of civilization, within a very recent period.”

These privately and institutionally initiated or purchased photographs circulated widely in space and over long periods of time as prints and were reproduced in various media. They were at display in public exhibitions and private homes in Africa, Europe and the Americas. Today, these photographs make up a part of a huge although highly decentralized visual archive which is open-ended and still dynamically in the making.

AiW Guest Christine Singer.

The widely anticipated film Of Good Report opened Film Africa 2013, London’s annual major celebration of film from Africa and the diaspora, on 1 November 2013 at the Hackney Picturehouse. Set in a small town in the rural Eastern Cape, this third feature by young South African director Jahmil XT Qubeka (following uMalusi and A Small Town Called Descent) is the somber, provocative story of a high-school teacher with a penchant for young girls. The film became the centre of public attention earlier this year following its controversial temporary banning by the South African authorities from the Durban International Film Festival 2013, making it the first local feature film to be banned since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Presented in black and white with sharp direction, Of Good Report takes its audience on an unsettling, surreal journey into the mind of a shy, young, and mentally troubled man, Parker Sithole, played by Mothusi Magano. When Sithole takes on a new job at a high school, the head teacher, flicking through his references, commends him for being a man “of good report”. As we are to learn later, a bitter irony lingers within this statement. Sithole promptly begins an illicit affair with one of his new students, the sexually charged 16-year-old Nolitha (played outstandingly by Patronella Tshuma), and, as The Guardian’s film critic Peter Bradshaw highlights, the similarity in sound between her name and “Lolita” is not a coincidence. Of Good Report represents a contemporary adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial novel Lolita (1955), set in South Africa and twisted with a serial killer reminiscent of Hitchcock’s Psycho. A dark comedy thriller that lends itself to classical film noir, Of Good Report leads the audience into the abyss of Sithole’s soul, who, haunted by the demons of his past, spirals into a voracious obsession with Nolitha that ultimately results in violent tragedy.

Jahmil XT Qubeka in conversation with Film Africa Director Suzy Gillett

Quebeka was present at Film Africa’s opening night and introduced Of Good Report by sharing his filmmaking philosophy: ‘You make films to be engaged. To love them, hate them. Just to have an audience engage a film, for me, is everything.’ Of Good Report does precisely that. The film’s thematic – the abuse of girls by older men – and its gritty, uneasy depictions of violence and sex make it stand out from South Africa’s contemporary landscape of local feature filmmaking; and this is certainly provoking responses from audiences, with no exception at Film Africa’s opening night. During the Q&A with Film Africa director Suzy Gillett, some viewers critiqued Qubeka for falling into sexist patterns when representing Nolitha at the expense of positive gender representations. Qubeka’s cinematography, indeed, devotes many scenes to Nolitha’s body shot in close-up and from a low angle, inevitably placing the viewer in a masculine subject position. One could argue that, framed in this way, Nolitha is being looked at as an object of desire and is subjected to the “male gaze” of Hollywood cinema that Laura Mulvey critiqued more than 30 years ago.

Qubeka, however, argued that the sexist framing of Nolitha was a necessary technique for allowing the narrative to unfold from the perspective of Sithole and for critiquing the misogyny underlying this character’s actions and thoughts.  Qubeka told the Film Africa audience: ‘I could easily have preached. I could have said: “this [gender-based violence] is bad”. But I feel that I have an insight in what I term “the wolf” – this misogynist, masculine perspective of the world (…). I felt if I had to really deal with the issue, I had to deal with it in the most honest way that I could (…). I’m not trying to fly the flag of misogyny. I’m saying that it exists. I’m trying to give you an understanding of what I believe is part of the seeds and the rhetoric of how a misogynist thinks.’ The director revealed that the film’s script was derived from own experiences of growing up to a violent father during the height of apartheid, adding that he sees the film as much as an exploration of gender-based violence in the context of South Africa as a ‘global story’ about patriarchal rules that dominate societies across the world.

That Qubeka deliberately chose to provoke rather than to “preach” makes Of Good Report not merely a social critique of gender-based violence but also an entertaining and captivating film with significant aesthetic value. Rich in symbolism, sarcasm, and intertextual references to Hollywood films, English literature, and popular culture, Of Good Report merges social critique with genre playfulness that is geared towards keeping audiences engaged. The film also offers more than the typical film noir, for the surreal and bizarre is lurking constantly within its monochrome frame. The sequences displaying Sithole’s vivid fantasies of Nolitha and memories of his past as a soldier in the DRC, underlined by an edgy soundtrack, create a dreamlike and unsettling atmosphere that kept us on the edge of our seats.

In South Africa, Of Good Report began to provoke debate even before anyone was able to see it, making it one of very few contemporary, locally made feature films that has stimulated nationwide public engagement. The South African Film and Publications Board refused to authorize any screening of the film on the grounds that it contained “child pornography”. Qubeka, his producers, and film critics compared the ban to film censorship during apartheid, proposing that the film’s major theme had touched a raw nerve in a country which has one of the highest rates of abuse of women by men, and where child rape and “sugar daddies” are endemic across wide sections of society. In this context, Of Good Report represents an important cinematic attempt at laying bare social misogyny and gender-based violence within contemporary South African feature filmmaking. When the film was banned from the opening night of the Durban International Film Festival, Qubeka, appeared on stage with his mouth taped shut, choosing not to comment as an act of protest. His wife, a doctor at a Cape Town hospital, delivered a poignant speech to highlight that the issues the film presents are very real and dealt with on a day-to-day basis in South Africa. These local controversies catapulted the film onto the international film festival circuit, aligning it with South African films that have gained international acclaim for engaging unsettling themes, such as Oliver Hermanus Skoonheid (2011), which dramatises a White Afrikaans-speaking extremist’s struggle with suppressing his homosexual identity.

The discussions Of Good Report has sparked both before and after its release give an indication that Qubeka’s intention to start a conversation about gender-based violence is bearing fruit. Although it would be naïve to deny that the film epitomises, to some degree problems associated with the sexist representations of women by male-authored films that have plagued the history of cinema, what can be said to “recuperate” it is the extent to which Qubeka tries to encourage engagement with misogyny and sexual violence. As he poignantly said to conclude Film Africa’s Q&A, ‘once you put up a film, it belongs to anybody.’ From this perspective, Of Good Report might be seen as an “instigator” of discussion, rather than a final word on sexual violence. The nature of these public discussions, and whether they cohere with the filmmaker’s intentions, remain major questions still to be answered.

Christine is currently teaching Media Studies and African film at SOAS, University of London, while pursuing her PhD on screen media and youth in post-apartheid South Africa. She is an editor of Red Feather Journal, an international journal for children’s visual cultures and alongside her academic research, she has worked with film festivals, media organisations, and NGOs, including Film Africa, One World Media and Unicef.

Watch the trailer for Of Good Report here.

Watch Film Africa ask Jahmil XT Qubeka three key questions here.

Hot on the heels of Christine Singer’s nuanced review of Jahmil XT Qubeka’s Of Good Report, Emma Dabiri shares insights from her recent conversation with Qubeka – exploring whether Of Good Report can be described as a ‘horror film’ or even a ‘black horror film’, and celebrating the role of the imagination and the autonomy of the audience in his film-making.

AiW Guest Emma Dabiri

Prowling between horror, noir and macabre comedy, Of Good Report is a beautifully shot, stylish, off the wall account of the dark heart of a seemingly mild mannered high-school teacher.

After the film’s UK premier, I meet director Qubeka and tell him of a heated debate I had with an audience member following the screening. We had argued as to whether or not Of Good Report is a horror film – for Qubeka, however, the answer is clear.

It’s blatantly a genre film, its not some serious drama you know what I mean? It’s a fairy tale, for me at least, its a dark, grim nightmare tale, it’s a horror film.

However, he understands where the confusion may lie:

I think people watch it and they aren’t sure whether they want to see it as a genre film or as a social critique, or as a serious film, because for me, its kind of both. There’s a certain intended bubble gum element. This world isn’t necessarily real but at the same time the textures and characters make it very real, and I think that’s why people may put it up for debate.

It’s possible that in addition to this there still lingers traces of the misconception that black people don’t ‘do genre’. American actress Erika Alexander recalls pitching a predominantly black science fiction film to a Hollywood studio executive, only to be told that the race of the protagonists would need to be changed. According to this influential executive ‘black people don’t like science fiction — they don’t see themselves in the future.’

While such views may seem surprising, they are not uncommon. The irony however lies in the depth to which these clichés are incorrect. In his 1974 film Space is the Place futurist pioneer musician Sun-Ra considered space the ideal site to reconstruct black humanity, free from the limitations which circumscribed black life in the earthly realm. Similarly the future, reimagined pasts and the dimensions of the other-worldly have long been the landscapes in which black innovators have reworked their fates. Imaginative and speculative genres have rendered open spaces in which we can both challenge negative representations of blackness and experiment with more diverse formulations than those that have been promoted in mainstream spaces. Such potentiality has been taken up in literature, from Toni Morrison whose work plays with time, and whose worlds are populated by spirits, murderers, men who can fly and a whole host of mystical and mythical beings, to Octavia Butler whose fiction spans galaxies.

In her critical survey Horror Noire (Routledge, 2011) Coleman positions the horror genre similarly as a domain in which negative constructions of blackness can be inverted. She suggests George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) is of great cultural significance because of this, not only is it arguably the ‘first film to have a black man playing the lead role regardless of, rather than because of, his colour’ (Romero cited in Coleman 2011: 106) but the black lead, Ben, is also the film’s hero, and his interactions with the white characters in the film throw the racist dynamics that characterize black/white relations in the US into sharp relief.

Unfortunately however, such notable exceptions aside, the possibilities for racial transformation inherent in film are rarely actualised to their fullest potential. Traditionally, black folk have not fared well in horror films. Where we were featured at all -‘the black guy always got it first’ – black bodies in horror reduced to little more than sensationally transgressed organic material with which to bump up the body count. On occasions where black characters are permitted leave to remain beyond the opening scenes, we appear as zombies, slaves and voodoo priestesses with depressing regularity.  Horror films with majority black cast and crew are rare – those that do exist can usually be noted for their B-movie type qualities and Blaxploitation themes.  When I discuss this with Qubeka he mentions that he’s influenced by B-movies although, while this may be the case, Of Good Report is considerably slicker than most B-movie offerings.  Considering African contexts more specifically, many Nollywood movies undoubtedly display elements of horror, but Nollywood is characterized by a particular look, feel, and aesthetic that again is not comparable to that Of Good Report.

Coleman distinguishes between “blacks in horror” films, and “black horror films”, the latter often having black directors and writers as well as black performers. In many regards Of Good Report fits Coleman’s criteria for a “black horror film”. However, according to her definition, “black horror films” are also “race films” (2011:7). For this reason I would be reluctant to categorize Of Good Report as a “black horror film”. While the director and the entire cast are indeed black and the dialogue is comprised of a mix of South African languages, Of Good Report is not a film that calls attention to racial identity, or highlights racialised dynamics between black and white in the way a film such as Night of the Living Dead does.

To describe a film as a South African horror in which the characters are black sounds simple enough, but this seemingly innocent fact can be read as a somewhat revolutionary act. Of Good Report represents what could be seen as a watershed in cinema. Unlike in “black horror films”, racial identity politics are not central to its plot, nor even apparent in the narrative. The characters that populate its monochrome world are not circumscribed by the limited roles reserved for black actors in genre films. While much work remains to be done in the sphere of critical race studies, and art remains an integral way to probe, interrogate and extend these discussions, there is also the real need for a space in which art created by black people is liberated from overt considerations of racial identity politics. While Of Good Report is undoubtedly of special significance to black film, it is ultimately a universally accessible piece of art that should appeal to global audience, both populist and critical alike.

Of Good Report is violent, and distinctly unsettling, but Qubeka is a master of disquieting subtlety. Rather then indulging in scenes of graphic violence he favours revealing to the audience snatches and glimpses of horror, providing our imaginations with the grim tools to fill in the gruesome blanks. As a technique it is extremely effective, and one that countless Hollywood horror directors might do well to remember. As Qubeka remarks:

[SPOILER ALERT!]

Never see the fear, it’s a huge disappointment. With a film or a great book, you want to immerse yourself in that world, -especially if you like horror stuff- you have to be scared, so what I’ve kind of found is that the more that I take away the more that there is to frighten people.

If you see how I’ve handled the violence against Nolita [the film’s femme fatale], people are so disturbed, but in fact, I show far less then they believe.

In that scene I take the camera away and I go to the perspective of the little boy. He’s not aware of what’s going on, it’s just him and his dog, and he’s upset that he can’t carry on with his video game. He’s just walking across the yard and it just so happens that as we go past, that in the background, through a silhouetted window, we see Nolita’s brains being splashed out, but its silhouetted, and the camera doesn’t stay there, it continues with the boy .The rest is in your head and that place is more scary then anything I could give you.

[OK, SPOILERS OVER…]

Qubeka’s approach –providing the audience with a level of autonomy, creating a space where they can work their own way through the narrative- permeates his philosophy far beyond techniques of how to convey horror.

We discuss the ‘Father of African Cinema’, Ousmane Sembene, who saw African film in large part as a tool for education. I ask Qubeka how he sees the role of film both in Africa, and more generally, and his reluctance to succumb to preaching or didacticism becomes apparent:

Film is there to entertain, to enlighten. I’m certainly not an advocate of entertainment for entertainment alone though. It needs to be engaging, and thought provoking. Even if its comedy. I’d rather it be far more open process in how each person interprets cinema for themselves, rather then just saying cinema is supposed to be an education. If I look back home at the kind of rhetoric I’ve heard, the kind of expectation of what filmmakers are supposed to do that leads to a certain way of doing things. I don’t tell a story necessarily because I have a certain type of ideology to convey.  

One feels he has a lot to say, yet allows for multiple ways in which the elements of his work can be interpreted.

He tells me that an upcoming project (one of many; Qubeka has a lot of plans) is a feminist tale, one he has developed, in part to  ‘purge my misogyny in Of Good Report’ (incidentally I would not label Of Good Report a misogynistic piece of art). Without giving too much away, it’s an Afro-futuristic sounding affair set 50,000 years ago in the Kalahari desert. Listening to Qubeka describe it, I cannot help but think how far Black African filmmakers have liberated the medium since the dark days of the ‘ethnographic’ filmmaking of directors like John Marshall, and his racist construction of the so-called Kalahari “Bushmen” in the feted 1957 film The Hunters.

Speaking to Qubeka fills me with hope. Perhaps he is harbinger of a new dawn – although perhaps this is too hyperbolic a mantle to bear. Regardless, his fertile imagination and deft technique suggest a man capable of recalibrating not just African cinema, but the landscape of film itself.

Emma Dabiri is an Irish Nigerian writer and commenter. She is currently undertaking her PhD in the sociology department at Goldsmiths University of London. Her doctoral research explores the multiple ways being ‘mixed-race’ has come to be gendered. Emma is also a teaching fellow in the Africa Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Her major passions include, African and African Diasporian performative and literary cultures, critical race studies, feminism and folklore. She blogs as thediasporadiva.tumblr.com. Follow her on twitter @TheDiasporaDiva

AiW Guest: Graham Riach.

The first edition of new literary magazine Prufrock, which appeared in autumn this year, cuts quite a dash. The cover must be somewhere around a Pantone 2635c, I imagine, with a line drawing of J. Alfred’s notorious rolled trousers. Why do I know these things, or rather, why do I feel I have to let you know that I do? Because I want you to think that I am the sort of young man who can, as a quotation from Robert Littel on Prufrock’s tumblr puts it, ‘drive a car, speak French fluently, play the piano, set a broken leg, and make horses do [my] bidding’. In other words, I am trying to pull off the kind of sprezzatura performance Prufrock does so well, and which, by so laboriously explaining myself, I am now making a fine flop of.

Prufrock has some good writing in it, sometimes some very good writing, from remarkably big catches for a new magazine – Koos Kombuis and Etienne van Heerden in issue two? Be still, my beating heart! The production is polished, with an immediately recognisable design, and a layout that has become more adventurous, and, with it, better, from the first edition to the second. Publishing an excerpt from Kombuis’ bilious ‘unpublished one-sentence novel written in a fit of depression […] in the winter of 2012’ in tightly-packed, crotchety nine-point print was inspired. Hedley Twidle’s playfully Oulipian ‘N2’ is a psychogeographical ‘non-travelogue’, an ‘anti-travel guide’ to a highway, punctuated by textual lay-bys and pee-breaks, ludic digressions and meanders. Everything is printed on a sensuous, textured, off-white paper that provokes in me an urge to loiter and thumb, to mooch by the book-racks.

Georgia Mae Grundlingh (Issue 2, p. 16)

The magazine has so far published pieces in English, Afrikaans, and a ‘Zulu, Xhosa and Bhaca amalgam’ that remains, sadly, beyond my ken. The author, AbdulMalik Sibabalwe Oscar Masinyana, describes the piece as a Traumnovelle, or dream story, and it hovers at the intersection of history and ecology. There is both fiction and nonfiction, should such a distinction be thought useful when dealing with some of Prufrock’s more chameleon pieces, and photographs, imbued with an Instagram-filtered fuzz that well suits the magazine’s muted palette. There are adverts for small publishers, boutique clothes shops, web design companies, and a service offering something called ‘brand consultation and experience design’. There are ads for Equal Education and a print-on-demand service that offers to print books not only ‘cheaply’ and ‘quickly’, but also ‘legally’. Issue two even hosts an advertisement advertising advertising  - a kind of advertising mise-en-abime. Perhaps inevitably given such a context, issue one also features an advert for a Creative Writing course.

Jody Brand (issue 1, p. 49)

These adverts, and the magazine’s aesthetic more generally, suggest an achingly hip target market, for whom design is paramount, and whose literary coordinates might not be South African in the traditional sense, that is to say, deeply rooted in local politics. In an interview, editor Helen Sullivan gave a map of the constellations by which Prufrock steers: ‘The Paris Review, The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, The Oxford American.’ No sign here of the more local and politically volatile Staffrider, Bolt, or Wurm. While Staffrider’s Mothobi Mutloatse wanted to ‘donder conventional literature’, to ‘pee, spit and shit on literary convention’[1], Prufrock’s attitude towards the venerable institutions of American and British magazine culture is altogether more respectful. This is not to say that politically aware writing is absent, rather it feels as if much of it has been passed through the same muting filter as the images. Anton Harber’s ‘The South African Problem’ is perhaps the most openly engaged piece, using the 1988 stand-off between Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee over the censorship of Salman Rushdie as a means to question the current Protection of State Information Bill – effectively a press gagging order. Also in issue one is a piece on young activists and artists in Gaza by Victoria Schneider, showing an international political engagement that the immediacies of apartheid-era South African politics tended to drown out. However, the majority of the writing in Prufrock is political only implicitly if at all, a state of affairs that will give some reason to celebrate, but will just as likely provoke the ire of others.

The magazine is perhaps attempting to find a space to talk about South African society in less engaged terms than was thought obligatory in the past, and is looking for a language in which to do so. The magazine’s title heralds what this language might look like – Prufrock is, of course, the protagonist of T.S. Eliot’s dyspeptic ‘Love Song’, and as Andrew van der Vlies has observed, South African literature’s ties with Eliot have a long history. He pops up in the most unusual places, from publishing Roy Campbell’s Adamastor to being intentionally misquoted for humorous effect in Zoë Wicomb’s ‘In Search of Tommie’ (in response to the poem’s august lines, TS, the story’s protagonist, retorts: ‘Only a moffie would worry about eating a peach’). Each time Eliot’s name appears in or near South African writing, his ‘brand’ serves as a code for the literary – Eliot™ grants a certain kudos, or as van der Vlies puts it, he acts as a ‘marker of authority and authenticity, of an ostensibly established literariness.’[2] By invoking Eliot in this way, Prufrock makes a bid for the literary high ground, a provocative act given South African writing’s long and complex relationship with the canon. Prufrock’s fresh approach and distinctive design are likely to draw a lot of attention, so it will be interesting to see which voices are allowed to occupy its platform in the future.

1. ^ Mothobi Mutloatse, Forced Landing: Writings from the Staffrider Generation (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1980), p. 5.
2. ^ Andrew van der Vlies, ‘Zoë Wicomb’s Queer Cosmopolitanisms’, Safundi, 12 (2011), 425–444, p. 428 <doi:10.1080/17533171.2011.586838>.

Graham Riach studied at the University of Glasgow before starting a Ph.D. at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 2011 on the contemporary South African short story. He works as a translator of French and Japanese, and composes music for films.

AiW Guest Armin Fardis.

We are being abandoned by history. Few care to read or think about it. We live increasingly in a ‘post-historic’: age, in the endless proliferation of technological means and what Jacques Ellul has called ‘efficient ordering’, that is, technological procedures applied everywhere. Ours is no longer a culture of memory. 

- John Paul Russo

Few texts emerge from within the fortified walls of the university to go on and enjoy a life of their own. Often those works produced by social scientists and humanists circulate inside an intramural and professionalized academic circuitry, avoiding interaction with the public audience from which the historical and cultural materials under analysis are in fact found. For nearly two decades Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic has defied such parochial tendencies, provoking intense debates on the transnational nature of black culture and the role of the black intellectual in modern society. Many scholars highlight Gilroy’s ability to show the ways in which the slave experience engaged and rehabilitated similar philosophical questions that were being mulled over by some of the primary figures of the European Enlightenment such as Hegel.

Yet, few invocations of The Black Atlantic give detailed attention to what Gilroy perceives as the anticolonial and anti-imperialist uses of the historical memory of slavery.  To fully appreciate not just the staying power of the text, but its actual relevance to our current socioeconomic predicaments, it is crucial to understand where the memory of slavery is made current, and how it can be used as tool of political resistance. To do such a thing is to illuminate the historical connection between current forms of racism, imperial war and economic depression alongside the function of the plantation economy in expanding the frontiers of capitalism.

That the plantation complex has dissolved is of less importance than the use of the political technologies and forms of knowledge that it generated and transmitted, in continued attempts to secure subject populations up to the Twentieth Century. In part, the continued relevance of plantation slavery is overlooked due to a version of American history that is as Eric Foner has called it, ‘the story of American freedom’: a narrative that asserts that freedom in the United States enjoyed exponential, relatively untrammeled growth from the Civil War until the Civil Rights Movement. However, the resistance to such a linear and stale view of the history of the United States persists by way of perceiving slavery as a metaphor for current forms of enslavement: prisoners as chattel, debt enslavement and structural adjustment, young men and women in the global sex trafficking trade and the list could of course continue.

This orthodox history of slavery, the version that believes its formal abolition corresponded to a disappearance of widespread racial terror, is pernicious, extensive and rearing its ideological head in the form of the current discourse of postracialism.  Alternatively, to view slavery in spectral terms, as a historical phenomenon that continues to shape the experience of black Atlantic denizens and other populations subject to imperial rule, allows for an understanding of historical change and continuity as coexisting phenomena. For Gilroy, much like C.L.R. James, it doesn’t end, it mutates.  To read The Black Atlantic in 2013 is to engage Gilroy’s view of black intellectual history at a moment in time where the vulnerability of black bodies to racial violence remains pervasive. The chorus of post-racial apologists will claim that such contemporary instances of racial terror are mere ephemera and of course point to the election of the first black American president as proof that racism is all but over. Yet, we now inhabit a world where the plantation complex has been supplanted by the prison industrial complex; where the racial terror meted out by Jim Crow white supremacists is now the work of domestic police; where the gentrifying forces of corporate capitalism facilitate the continued racial segregation of space, education and employment. Tragedies such as the murder of Oscar Grant by transportation authorities, the equally tragic fate faced by Trayvon Martin, the public execution of Amadou Diallo by plainclothes police, are but a few stark examples that such social antagonisms are increasingly becoming the rule and not the exception. For these reasons when revisiting texts such as The Black Atlantic we must, as informed readers, learn to let historical memory live.

The Black Atlantic, for me, was an anticolonial model, a way of mapping the history of the African diaspora in terms of colonial resistance. For Frederick Douglass—his travels to Ireland illuminated the commonalities between the Irish liberation movement and the black abolitionist struggle. This transnational connection remains enshrined in Falls Road, Belfast where a mural is dedicated to Douglass and the African American struggle for freedom. For Du Bois, you have this development of an anti-colonial politics by way of his racialised experience in the United States, stoking his consciousness until you see it rise like a tidal wave in his texts, culminating in his exile and eventual death. What binds these figures together is the use of their local experience with racial subordination to generate a global anti-colonial consciousness. Thus, if we are to invoke The Black Atlantic as Gilroy did we must struggle to highlight the connections between the legacy of slavery and the acceleration of global capitalism as perhaps the greatest threat to the oppressed populations of our planet.

Armin Fardis is a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University in the department of African and African American Studies with a primary field in English.  His research deals with the aesthetics of resistance in Caribbean, African-American and Irish anti-colonial literature and visual art.  In addition to his broader concern with the intellectual history of anti-colonial thought, he is interested in critiques of the prison-industrial complex found in the literary narratives of incarcerated anti-colonial intellectuals.

AiW Guest: Uche Peter Umez. 

“Ironies and satires provide poetry with a kind of cynical beauty…” 

Interviewer’s Note: Musa Idris Okpanachi teaches English Linguistics at the Department of English, Federal University, Dutse, Jigawa State, Nigeria. His poems have appeared in Vultures in the Air: Voices from Northern Nigeria, Kunapipi (Denmark), Pregnant Skies, Pyramids and Iraqi Literary Review. His first poetry collection The Eaters of the Living won the 2008 Association of Nigerian Authors/Cadbury Prize for poetry (2008) and was shortlisted for the 2009 Nigeria Prize for Literature. His second collection From the Margins of Paradise was longlisted in the Association of Nigerian Authors/Poetry Prize for 2013. 

Uche Peter Umez: Philip Larkin said his aim in writing a poem is ‘to construct a verbal device that would preserve an experience indefinitely by reproducing it in whoever read the poem.’ What is a poem to you? And what is your own aim?

Musa Idris Okpanachi: A poem, I think, is a short telegraphic means for expressing an emergency of meaning. Poetry is an ellipsis whose lacunae are recovered when the reader processes it and this is where it derives its power, from arrays of meanings and the occlusion of metaphors. It has a liberating effect on the poet after an effective execution of the subject matter, a purgatory satisfaction that a social process has been eternally captured in the maximum knots of metaphors. In this sense, it is a healing for the pain inflicted, a balm for the beauty experienced, captured and made perfect, a satisfaction for the fact that an ephemeral fleeting thought has been reproduced, in a permanent shape, in the best of forms within the limits of the linguistic competence of the poet. That is why I have said in an interview that I publish out of frustration (mind you, I did not say I write out of frustration). That is, I know my poems are imperfect but I lack the skill and inspiration to make them ideal.

At times, in its pragmatic function, a poem is schemata for approximating an experience that comes after its composition (prophetic?). In some countries a poem that precedes the independence of a nation becomes its national anthem. Or when Okigbo writes ‘When you have finished/And done up my stitches/Wake me near the altar/And this poem will be finished’, little did he know that he would die (obviously from multiple wounds) at the battle front of the Nsukka sector of the Nigerian civil war. During apartheid in South Africa, a South African student in one of the Nigerian universities, on reading my poem ‘Silence of Time’ in The Eaters of the Living cautions I should not allow anyone to read it, as it would provoke suicide. A female student who read the same poem burst into tears saying it aptly defined her dilemma.

Umez: I noticed in both collections, The Eaters of the Living and From the Margins of Paradise, your generous use of irony and satire in representing the depravity of the political class. In ‘The legion of Cain’, you wrote about the elite who ‘love the land/So they bite off her lips/In passionate kiss of patriotism’, while in ‘When they die, you proposed that the politicians, when they die, be made ‘high profile/Advisers from the graves’. In ‘The mice king’, you depicted a mouse king who ‘sits/On a clay throne/Wielding a tail of gun’, while in ‘The god we made’, corruption is the clay-footed god ‘for whom/The nation stands/Still.’ I am just wondering: do you view poetry as a kind of ideological communication?

Okpanachi A writer in our setting has limitations of metaphors that could aptly capture the current scenes of the world, especially if it is a question of public trust, responsibility and accountability. The bizarre conduct of those in positions of responsibility defies conventional tropes and is increasingly assuming the literary ethos of folktales, ironies to the extent that the scenarios of public accountability have become vast practical laboratories of satire and lampoon sketches. In fact, if one collects and publishes ‘facts’ in the news around the world, it would be sufficient as compendia of literary masterpieces. In a situation like this, poetry becomes a vehicle for ideological communication, especially as my style seeks to create images through expressions that are fresh and perhaps ‘unique’ reductionist tricks in satire that reproduce the subject matter in ironical and sometimes in diminutive forms.

Indeed, ironies and satires provide poetry with a kind of cynical beauty and protective devices for the poet, especially from those who crave absolute social control of human behaviour. Doubtless, a poem is stronger if it is moored and structured as a vehicle for ideological expression. That, however, does not mean we should lose sight of its double entendre and arrays of multiple meanings, which is the potent grace of poetry.

Then again, when cannibalism in high places becomes an open national debate on the television you know for sure that morality has gone berserk, which was what I tried to mirror in The Eaters of the Living. The nation and the masses have been eaten by the colossal index of corruption and the weak unity of the nation, and we are collectively hurt. As a poet, one is helpless as to the manner in which to represent the behaviour of political actors, especially the do-or-die games of desperadoes they play. When they fight, as with the lawmakers in the National Assembly and the recent Rivers State legislative house duel, I want to believe with the naive hindsight of a poet that they are driven by extreme patriotism to protect the interest and the mandates of the masses. Thus, my ‘Manifesto’ contains the dual ventriloquist voices of the actor, ‘the monologue’, of schizophrenic balances between the real intention and verbal camouflage of the inner musings of the public office holders (who intruded into office using arms and ammunitions).                              

Umez: In the poem ‘Words elude me’, the poet seems resigned to taciturnity, saying, ‘I was once a word/Then a syllable/Now a silent letter/In the fist of sphinx.’ But in a previous poem, ‘The secret word,’ the poet sounds eloquent and prophetic, even conjuring up images of the potent word as ‘a compass’ that ‘keeps the world orbiting.’ Do you think of poetry as a voicing of your dissent against the political system? An act of rebellion against silence, perhaps?

Okpanachi: I am greatly intrigued by the enigma of silence. I once asked my students the functions of silence. Poetry is a veritable voice of dissent against anything that works against human rights, freedom and humanity. Poetry is more dignified than politics. All over the world, many are silent. The greatest key on the tongue is silence. No one can pluck from your mind what you have refused to say and no one can take back from the ears what has been uttered. So, silence is protest. Some democracies from the US to Africa have measured their citizens into silence in recent times more than all the fascist governments put together, making the leadership have their way, as if they are presiding over cemeteries. 

Umez: Most of the longer poems in your collections deal with the eternal themes of love and beauty, such as ‘My soul mate,’ and ‘My dove’, ‘Half of a poem’, ‘Flower in the rain’, and ‘Dossiers of flowers’. Did you start out first as a love poet? Are the poems addressed to an imaginary lover or are they symbolic expressions of your love for the country? Can you say just a few words about the stanza below? 

O heart, is this what it means
To love my own beauty in another.

Okpanachi: I began as a committed poet who hates any form of injustice. My first poem was in secondary school when I was going to write my West Africa School Certificate Examination. I was told by way of rumours that the affair of the examination was usually a shoddy one, that results could be swapped. I could not imagine the injustice and wrote a poem along this line: ‘The sun sets at noon/The victim falls biting sand’. One of my students from a royal family surprisingly expresses my mind in this respect when she says that for weeks she would not go out because she is helpless in alleviating the endemic poverty she sees on the street.

Notwithstanding, I am basically a platonic lover because the admirable beauty of a woman needs a spiritual savouring and intense responsibility beyond sex. Some of my love poems are experimental attempts to test my skills of erotic expressions, addressed to ‘a dark lady’. A few are devoted to the nostalgia of the biblical look-back of Lot’s wife, without the forbidden fruits. I am generally a connoisseur of beauty. I worship beauty in whatever form and on whatever entity it sits as an artist. A look back to loves that were scuttled, sacrificed and that were never consummated as explained above, love that never went beyond a glance. Most of the poems are to my country which is slipping out of my fingers like some sand when I most value her.

The greatest gift of God to humanity is love in whatever form it takes. This psychological human capacity to sympathise, empathise and dissolve into another being in order to realize the self has ensured the continuity of generations of mankind. Some of my poems celebrate love because we live in a difficult world which has caused a lot of misery to the innocent in form of war, violence and gradual break down of family values and relating to others on contractual basis without passion or emotion.

My love poems are palliatives on the sores, bandages on wounds, the tranquiliser petering drop by drop into the minds and giving hope ‘they do not promise’ (Nuruddin Farah). In Islam, kalimat-tayyib sadaqat (polite kind words of goodness is charity). Therefore, there is the need to say something that piques, delights in the general aesthetic schemata of poetry. One of the poems is devoted to my wife whose love is an art that gives me the impression that each of us could amputate any of his/her limbs to keep the other alive, or perhaps she wishes we would die lying side by side like the couple in Taha Ben Jelloun’s Silent Day in Tangiers. After all, love is a chemical reaction whose equation is a mystery and whose tenor is zephyr that evaporates into the souls.

On the lines above, I wish to state that every instance of an act of love is narcissistic. There are traces and maps of the self in what you fall in love with in the other. This may be spiritual but there are invisible links, an essence or the inexplicable self in the other person.

Umez: Marvin Bell said, ‘Poetry is, after all, another way of thinking.’ What insight does the act of writing poetry offer you, in your attempt to grapple with the question of identity which recurs in your collections? Has your humanity been questioned on the basis of identity?

Okpanachi: Poetry makes me see nuances of spectra of colours in the rays of the sun; it makes me apprehend the substance without the shadow, to feel the deft underhand trick without the magic. And I would tell you that there is no conflict in the world since Adam cannot be traced to identity, from family feud to complete international anarchies; from the smallest population of Eden through the identities of God, Eve, Adam, angels, the snake, Bosnia, Rwanda to the People’s Republic of China. I personally have had to nurse my own little bruises of discriminations, insults and injuries. As soon as you are conceived you are different and your identity begins. As soon as you move out from your own ethnic God-given place of birth or the place of your residence, you become different and are in competition.

In most cases, my grappling with the issue of identity is empathy with others who know where their shoes pinch. It is hard to see anything else that is more inimical to the unity of this great country than ethnicity. Remove it and the sky would be the beginning of Nigeria. To me the only art that can capture the right mood and essence of identity is poetry and the poetic mind is sensitive. This can be seen in the Palestinian poems of Mahmoud Darwish. It is with a lot of insight for Edgar Mittelhozer to assert that even if men can live down discrimination on basis of race and religion they would still discriminate on the basis of height. Some of us would have been angels if we were accepted and assessed on our merits and our wings would have been larger.

In another breath, it is not hard to see the beauty identity affords us in the varying apotheosis and transformation of words into globules and arrays of signifiers that disturb and upset the stability of meanings in works of art, especially in reading poetry from ours and other cultures. This teaches us that there is no permanent way – of looking at the world as a crucible of meanings.

Umez: How do you go about creating a poem? Do you take mental notes? Do you take notes on a paper, or keep a journal? Or do you start writing the poem as it comes to you and later spend hours in polishing it? What’s the process like for you? Is it mostly ‘recollected in tranquility’?

Okpanachi: I carry my unwritten poems like a handbag; like a grudge seething with vengeful impulse, nurse it and write it. Poetry is a possibility with more than a thousand ways of reproducing an entity, impression or experience. One way I compose is to identify a theme and strike towards achieving its poetic format in a maximum literary expression in a way that it cannot be stated better. At times, the development of a poem clings to just a word as an appropriate inspiration and other words come in clusters to finish the poem. Some come about actually from dreams like my poem, ‘The Word’ and what is salvaged from dreams are often the very poor version when the sublime is gone with the dream. Some are never captured. At times, a dire situation presents itself and I have to fetch words from the lips of Muse and the eternal script of infinity.

What shall we do with anger if there is nothing to be angry about, especially if one’s anger is never felt by the object of anger? Hence, my favourite phrase from the Quran, ‘sumum bukmum umyun’ translated as deaf dumb and blind when the guide is blind.  I am infinitely inspired by the human condition. My poems are the mouthpiece of the downtrodden, those of whom I told my creative writing class are reduced by the system to a social nadir below the dust beneath the shoes. They have no name and are never as individuals. They only appear on the TV as miserable examples of mass victims of natural disasters, strange disease, a group no one knows except as statistical figures and number, ‘We are marooned beggars/With no one to beg from’. These are my definite inspiration. The actual woman who deposited her child with the trader from whom she bought some food items at the market, and the man who came to ask after a worker in the office on a Saturday because his child had died and he could not afford the pall to bury him in. The tricks of the realities of their lives are beyond the waywardness of poetic licence.  They are the ones who physically build skyscrapers and no street is named after them. They dig the graves of presidents, senators and prime ministers without epitaphs written in their memories. Yet, ‘big’ men do not bury one another.

I do not keep a journal, but I write directly on the computer. The mercurial flexibility of the computer screen helps me a lot in writing and revision so that when I have finished and done with my poems and they are published I can hardly read them again. I write instinctively and take the writing leisurely as if it is not a serious matter.

Umez: In writing a poem, what tensions do you undergo – besides mental strain? And how do you resolve them? Do you feel a kind of burdening or unburdening in the act of writing? Do you feel any release when you have finished writing a poem and you are at least satisfied by the result?

Okpanachi: The first tension I experience in writing is the struggle between my ideas and how they can be matched with words. How to transmit to the reader the same feelings, emotion and elicit the same empathy I feel from the readers. This is resolved by a detached editing of the text. When each poem fits and matches the subject matter, I feel a secret happiness and at times I can’t change even a word in the poem. So, I just leave it as it is. Poems like ‘Crush Me’ in The Eaters of the Living and ‘Lonely Road to Baghdad’ in From the Margins of Paradise really give me a relief and purgation after they were executed because I naively believe the wordings conveys the spirits of the themes and then I have this unburdening.  

Umez: There is so much poetry online by young Nigerian poets. What do you think of the present situation of poetry in Nigeria? Don’t you think there is a decline in the quality of poetry published these days?  What should we be doing to address this blight?

Okpanachi: Poetry is culturally focused in the broad sense of the word, ‘culture’ as a totality of learned experience by which, within schemata, we solve life problems. The school system is battered. The language of social networks is colloquial and cannot support creativity. The education and the attitude of the new poets to the process of acquired intellectualism are deficient and cannot support the creation of culture. There is a general decline in the quality of poetry but here and there we see some snippets of good poetry. This generation is not patient for the philosophical demands of poetry because wisdom precedes philosophy. It seems the quality of poetry follows the decay in the society. Writing poetry requires a lot of patience. There are no prescriptions. A proper acquisition of language skills is important. Finding a place where deep thinking can take place is equally vital. And originality should be strived for. Being a poet, mentally, all the time and converting situations into poems is needed.

Umez: In some of your poems there is a marked reference to “mother.” For instance, “Message from mother” in the collection From the Margins of Paradise and “Mother” in The Eaters of the Living.  In both poems, mother assumes the persona of a prophetess, foregrounding a strong bond between the poet and his mother. What were you thinking of when you wrote these poems? Finally, what poets are important to you as a poet?

Okpanachi: Mother for me has protean poetic and cultural ambiguities: The earth as a mother and nourisher of mankind, the mother as a biological procreation and intimacy to whom one reveals poetic secrets. Much of my skill of my mother tongue which I brought to bear on English came from the diction of mother. Mother as a poetic type is an anchor from where to find the bearing in time of social dysfunction and anarchy.  As for my favourite poets, I would include Wole Soyinka, Mahmoud Darwish, Pablo Neruda, Maya Angelou, Kofi Awoonor, Gibran Khalil, and Nizan Kabbani.

Uche Peter Umez is a poet and short fiction writer. An Alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), Uche has participated in residencies in Ghana, India, Switzerland and Italy. He was one of the winners in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and has twice been shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2007 and 2011. His latest children’s book Tim the Monkey and Other Stories has just been published by Africana First Publishers, Nigeria.

AiW Guest: Uche Peter Umez.

“the good poem must and should be readable, friendly to the spoken word without being pedantic and pedestrian”

Interviewer’s Note: Remi Raji,  Nigerian poet, scholar, literary organiser, and cultural activist, is the author of six poetry collections: A Harvest of Laughters (1997), Webs of Remembrance (2001, rpt. 2003), Shuttlesongs America: A Poetic Guided Tour (2003), Lovesong for my Wasteland (2005), Gather My Blood Rivers of Song (2009) and Sea of my mind (2013). He has performed his works in the US, Europe, South Africa, and Ethiopia. He is a lecturer at the University of Ibadan, where he is the Dean of the Faculty of Arts. A former General-Secretary of the Nigerian Centre of PEN International, he is the current National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA). His recently-published poetry collection Sea of my mind was longlisted for the 2013 Nigeria Prize for Literature.

Uche Peter Umez: For some poets, the inspiration for a poem comes looking for them, for others they go searching for it. What’s your experience, given that you have published six poetry collections? And apart from your latest collection Sea of my mind, which of your poetry collection was the most difficult to write?

Remi Raji: For me, inspiration arises from the awareness of the instinct to reflect and then write about an experience or idea. And the awareness I speak about comes from within primarily; a writer is either inspired or he is not; but a second kind of inspiration is that which becomes possible out of moments and years of training for that instinct, that fleeting delicate moment when the abstract imagination becomes flesh in the mind of the potential writer, the moment when the inner ear and eye can capture what has not been heard or seen by the other person. My practical experience has been both of primary inspiration and secondary inspiration. Which of my collection was the most difficult to write? The one collection I found difficult to decide upon was my first, A Harvest of Laughters (1997), not in the sense that I found it hard to write, but perhaps because it was my first published work, coming thirteen years after my graduation as a student of Creative Writing at the University of Ibadan.

Umez: Although water imagery resonated in some of the poems in Sea of my mind, I was surprised to notice that there was more bird imagery than fish imagery in the collection. Could you talk about this?

Raji: I will tell you clearly that all I set out to do was to capture all that was possible to be captured in the briefest space of poetry, using the “sea” as metaphor. But I am not sure if I actually intended to use bird imagery more than fish imagery, by which I think you mean water imagery. Also, I am not sure if I intended to draw on only just one cache of elemental imagery in the collection. Perhaps, it would just be better to say that I just wrote a decade of emotions into the work.

Umez: There are slight echoes of J.P. Clark in some poems, of course you dedicated “Kiagbodo” to Clark, but a line in “Soft Bite” reminds me of a poem by Christopher Okigbo. Do you draw inspiration from these poets? What other poets would you be found reading these days?

Raji: Of course, you know that a talent informs and is always informed by the tradition it serves and by the tradition it associates with. As some of my contemporaries who are aware of the discourse of Nigerian poetic tradition and the individual talent, I belong in the concentric circle of cultural influences and adaptations. There are indeed echoes of Clark, and Okigbo, and Soyinka, and Osundare in my poetry; true arrival is when those resonations become individualized and originality becomes a matter of difference. Part of “Kiagbodo” was composed in J. P. Clark’s riverine town of Kiagbodo, its parody in part of “streamside exchange” should be unmistakable to those who read Nigerian poetry closely. But I have a long line of poets who I draw inspiration from: Mazisi Kunene, Tchicaya U Tam’si, Kofi Awoonor, Kofi Anyidoho, Agostinho Neto, Oswald Mtshali, those early African poets who we were exposed to in formal schooling. Apart from these Africans, there is the heritage of African American and Caribbean poets from which I drew inspiration both as student and teacher: Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Robert Hayden, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Derek Walcott, Imamu Amiri Baraka and Eugene Redmond. Three other influences from other literary traditions are Pablo Neruda of Chile, Czeslaw Milosz of Poland and Heinrich Heine of Germany. It seems, surprisingly so, that I have weaned myself of my first true influence, the huge English literary tradition of William Wordsworth, John Keats and T. S. Eliot! Surprisingly so because I realised that I overcame the classical influence even as I continued to teach the formalism of English poetic traditions as a standard example of engagement for the creative and critical faculties among my students.

Umez: Seamus Heaney once wrote, “A poem floats adjacent to, parallel to, the historical moment. What happens to us as readers when we board the poem depends upon the kind of relation it displays towards our historical life.” So I was wondering if you wrote the poem, “At last poetry is on the streets” during the ominous periods of Occupy Nigeria: it reflected that particular historical moment for me.

Raji: Interesting. Some poems arrive truly made for the moment. “At last poetry is on the streets” is one of such poems. Given our historical antecedents, the poem is not likely to suffer the pang of a topical text because it continuously means more than what I had imagined when it was written. Its creative process was that of Occupy Nigeria, but you will not find the particularity of that historical moment in the lines. Personally, I always want to defy topicalities in my poetry, yet there are poems that won’t give.

Umez: In “Untold”, the mood of the poet is ambivalent, he wants to “burst into an ocean of songs” but at the same time he is “afraid now”. Even when he paints a picture of flight, he still remains “seated”, “perched”, “poised” and wracked with questions. Does this somehow represent a similar dilemma for you? As someone who often occupies positions of responsibility and trust, do you find yourself in a situation where your voice is “a gurgling warmth, a cavity full of tiny sensations?”

Raji: Again, the poem may not be about me, but it is essentially the imagination of what must have occurred or what should have been. I hope you are aware that the poetic persona is not necessarily the poet in person, so this is not about me. Yes, you are right: “Untold”, as I imagined it in composition, is about the dilemma of prevarication and indecision.

Umez: One recurring feature of your poetry is that a good number of your poems are written precisely for the ear rather for the page. Do you agree? Do you think you are writing for “performance”? And do you have in mind that you might have to perform the poems at one time? 

Raji: I have had occasion to reflect on the dialectic of poetry and performance poetry, theoretically speaking. In practice, I try to collapse the difference and work between the rigour of the imagery for the eye/brain, and the energy of the voice in flight. I believe that good and enduring poetry must be for the page only because it has to be written, but the good poem must and should be readable, friendly to the spoken word without being pedantic and pedestrian. For me, poetry is all about the feelings of knowing by all the senses possible – seeing and hearing, and perhaps touching as well.

Umez: In all your poetry collections, there has been this abiding theme of political consciousness, an undying love for the land, even when it makes “serial casualties” of us, even when it “spins on the pin of our pains”. Why do you think poetry matters? Is it potent enough to incite political action in a country infested with crass materialism?

Raji: As a student of literature and political history, I know that poetry, where it matters, does matter. I know that fiery but persuasive words have moved mountains off the road of oppression. Perhaps not yet in my country. Yet I believe that poetry does matter. I am both inveterate optimist and incorrigible radical nationalist. I believe that when words are carefully used over time, they will not only incite, they will exert the force of action necessary for change. 

Umez: How much of your background as an academic informs your vision of poetry? How do you balance teaching, literary criticism, poetry writing and social activism? Do you feel limited in any way?

Raji: Rather than being limited, I believe I am very privileged as a student and teacher of literature, a literary scholar writing poetry and involved in social activism. It is about an engine running full steam, and I am afraid sometimes that I am too dedicated to the vocation. My background as an academic deeply informs my idea of poetry, and you should be surprised if it doesn’t. Also, I bring to the formal training what I call the native intelligence of the heritage of Yoruba poetry recitation.

Umez: Your earliest collections, A Harvest of Laughters and Webs of Remembrance, were shaped by robust lyricism, whereas your latest collection, Sea of my mind, is much more tempered in its lyricism. What could account for this? How much does your lyricism draw from oral tradition?

Raji: As I noted earlier, the ready-formed poem must be both written and readable, oral and aural to a very large extent. I have always depended on the intelligence of orality. It is of course natural to grow into it and be influenced further as you develop towards certain originality. I do not believe in simple transliterations of the heritage of oral poetry which forms the base of the typical written African poetry. Lyricism is therefore a constant, like the breath, with its unique heave and pace at different moments.

Umez: Could you talk a bit about “Our fragments?” In this poem, the words were running into each other, why did you choose to structure the poem that way? What shapes a poem for you? Is it mainly visual or aural?

Raji: I will simply say that “Our fragments” is a doubly ironic poem. I still await more criticisms of the poem. I will only add that the poem speaks for itself, graphologically. It has become a sort of test and game for the first comer to that collection. Poetry is all about structure, and the structure includes visualization, aurality, and the tangibility of the text.

Umez: And finally, as a literary critic, how would you define this current generation of poets, particularly the emerging voices in Nigerian poetry? Generally, what do you think of the present situation of poetry?

Raji: There are many young Nigerian writers who are doing good poetry now. I will not assay to call them a generation per se, but a few serious and engaging works are emerging. Perhaps because of more critical interest in prose fiction, some of these writers have not had adequate attention. This is not strange. It is only those who are consistent in their art, those who do not go after the hype and glamour of being called poets, who will survive. However, the present situation of poetry, at least the parts I have seen and heard, does not portend well for the good health of a really emergent generation. As I said, there are some who are really talented and engaging; but there are also many who think of poetry as prattle or words foaming by the sides of the mouth, what they call “spoken word”. In real cosmopolitan traditions where the “spoken word” comes alive, as opposed to the conventional practice of screamers and word-munchers, there is real poetic energy, there is measured fire, rhythm and the lyricism which differentiates enduring poetry from plain doggerel. Being in the digital age has helped some, but it has also foisted a rash of poetasters on the land. The positive force of social media is yet to be harnessed in this part. I believe it will be soon, some of those serious, engaging and engaged young poets will break forth.

Uche Peter Umez is a poet and short fiction writer. An Alumnus of the International Writing Program (USA), Uche has participated in residencies in Ghana, India, Switzerland and Italy. He was one of the winners in the Commonwealth Short Story Competition in 2006 and 2008 respectively, and has twice been shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature in 2007 and 2011. His latest children’s book Tim the Monkey and Other Stories has just been published by Africana First Publishers, Nigeria.

For more of Uche’s interviews for Africa in Words:
Musa Idris Okpanachi
Afam Akeh

AiW Guest jalida scheuerman-chianda

The second time I met Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor she was sitting at a round wooden table in the garden of the Kwani? office in Nairobi, waiting to be interviewed on the launch of her debut novel Dust. She and I were going to spend the week together as I guided her through a programme of events for Kwani?’s 10th anniversary and the publication of her novel in Kenya. I like to think that the first time we met, or shall I say our spirits met, was when I read her Caine Prize winning short story Weight of Whispers. I was struck by the skill and grace with which she addressed the loss of ‘home’ and death, but equally new beginnings and life. I had not realized at the time that this first encounter with her writing was the beginning of a journey that would lead me to a day we finally shook hands and became ‘sisters’.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

Dust is a novel which speaks from hidden histories and landscapes. I was in awe of this authoress who had dared to give voice to ‘the margins’ by relocating ‘the center’ to Lake Turkana. As a region often forgotten and misunderstood, I was apprehensive yet impatient to discover how Yvonne was going to portray the place I thought of as home.

“Spare pastures, ephemeral watering holes. Dust-filled cupules containing red, black, green, and white pebbles speckle the land; unfinished sand games entice drifters to sit and play. Fresh dung tracks on gold-flecked violet stones.”

In an instant, Yvonne had transported me back to that day when I arrived for the first time in Kalokol at the age of 6. The dust in every nook and cranny of my body, the searing heat, the sudden bursts of wind, the naked yet ancient and majestic landscape. She is a child of the desert who understands that the dunes, the rocks, the mountains, the wells, the cattle, the sun, the moon, the stars, the winds that carry the stories and secrets of ancestors who lived in these lands. Like the histories of Kenya, the desert of Turkana is complex and intense. A place to delve at one’s own risk and this is precisely what Yvonne does so boldly and beautifully.

Knopf, 2014 (US Edition)

The story begins with the death of a son and brother who finally journeys back ‘home’ to Turkana after many years away. The loss of Odidi Oganda shatters his family as they all try to come to terms with their grief and guilt. The plot allows an exploration of the psychology of loss and is partly driven by the question: what happens to those who are left behind? The sudden and violent death of Odidi leaves his family asking “why?” As they each try to make sense of their new reality, family secrets are uncovered and old wounds are opened once more. Akai runs off into the desert unwilling to accept her son is gone, while Nyipir decides to tackle the unforgiving land by digging a cairn for his son. Ajany goes in pursuit of her brother, refusing to believe that he would leave her lost and alone. But the Oganda family are not the only ones who search for and mourn a loved one. Isaiah Bolton has come from England to look for the father he never knew and longs for. Once more, the paths of the Ogandas and Boltons intersect as Isaiah journeys to the house his father built in the Northern Frontier District; Wuoth Ogik is the place that both the Ogandas call home and that carries the secrets of his parents’ past. Yvonne deftly lures us in as each character’s voyage becomes our own and we are not only confronted with their individual pasts but that of a collective Kenyan past. This is a tale of death, love, despair, hope, discovery, betrayal, forgiveness, stolen lives and histories, identities, and new beginnings.

For me, as a child of Kenya, Dust’s power lies in its ability to recognize and present possibilities for us to explore and understand our difficult histories from the Mau Mau rebellions to Tom Mboya’s assassination out of a love for our country. Yvonne reveals the ways these events shaped and continue to shape not only Kenya, but each one of us. She writes with elegant anger and has the rare ability to affect the human soul. Reading Dust, I felt a profound sense of belonging.

jalida scheuerman-chianda was born in 1989 to a Kenyan mother and Dutch father. She grew up in Kenya where she and her younger sister spent an important part of their childhood and youth in Lake Turkana, where their parents run safaris. She recently graduated in Social Sciences from the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. During her studies, she discovered a passion for decolonial and feminist theories, with an emphasis on silenced histories. She is currently working on short stories themed around the topic of ‘internal crisis’. She is hoping to soon begin on a novel centered on the topic of being and growing up ‘métisse’ in Kenya.

Dust was published by Kwani Trust in Kenya in November 2013 and by Knopf in the US on 28th January 2014.

AiW Guest Amber Murrey 

Chad-Cameroon Oil Pipeline station in central Cameroon.

An influential Pan-Africanist and historian, Walter Rodney’s work provides guidance, invigoration and sustenance to PanAfricanists, scholars of Africa and the African Diaspora, and those interested in the socio-historical roots of social inequality.

As a university professor in Tanzania and Jamaica, he taught a nuanced and complex historical understanding of the exploitative relationship between Europe and Africa. In his assessment of pre-colonial and colonial European systems of exploitation on the continent, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), he challenges us to rethink the historical roots of ‘underdevelopment’ and the politics of economic and cultural domination.  Rodney was highly critical of colonial-to-independency state power transitions, critiquing the opportunism of African upper classes, whom he believed to have facilitated the continuation of colonial business as usual.  His ideas were, and are still, radical and controversial.

Rodney’s historical materialist examination of poverty remains necessary in institutions of higher learning today, where the root causes of social inequality are often obscured or unaddressed; where there is a gap between an awareness of poverty and a comprehension of the longue durée of structural forces creating and sustaining violently unequal life chances. Watching the 2008 documentary, The End of Poverty, I was struck by the resonances between the film’s central arguments and those of Rodney, written by him more than thirty years before the release of the documentary: that impoverishment and underdevelopment are not incidentally inexplicable modern phenomena but are often inherent components of historical geopolitics (I examine his foundational text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, in much more detail here).

Rodney’s work and commitment to ‘bread and justice’ inspired some of my nascent examinations of the lived, material consequences of structural violence, or those seemingly permanent violences ‘built into’ the global capitalist system that remain largely unrecognised as violence (Johan Galtung 1969).  Drawing from Rodney’s work on the historical materialism of violence and development from a holistic standpoint, I use ‘structural violence’ as a conceptual tool to understand how the processes and effects of displacement, land and resource dispossession, resettlement, livelihood destruction and damage to the natural environment (including water pollution, oil spillage, destroyed land, deforestation) along the pipeline are experienced concurrently in people’s everyday lives. So that, I suggest, a holistic perspective allows insights on the complexity of life and resistance amidst structurally violent forces along the pipeline.

Man stands above pipeline right-of-way near Kribi, Cameroon.

During storytelling sessions for my project, I draw from Rodney’s emphasis on the political relevance of everyday or nonacademic encounters, as evidenced through his praxis of grounding.  Rodney engaged in what he called groundings with his brothers as a way of destabilising the often compartmentalised fields of academic engagement: where ‘the field’, the classroom, theoretical abstraction, and everyday life are arbitrarily divided (by the languages that we speak but also by our actions within these spaces). Through the practice of grounding, the power distinctions between institutions of elite learning and open, participatory debate are blurred.

In Groundings with my Brothers (1969), Rodney explains,

‘I would go further down into West Kingston and I would speak wherever there was a possibility of our getting together.  It might be in a sports club, it might be in a schoolroom, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully’ (64).

Importantly,

‘[he] was prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down and talk and listen… a sitting down together to reason, to “ground” as the Brothers say.  We have to “ground together”’ (78).

Through groundings, Rodney connected with non-academics on subjects of socio-political and historical importance. He situated his view from the ground and had an abiding respect for moments of consciousness-raising and intellectual vibrancy with people outside of academia. In so doing, he firmly located the place of knowledge creation – particularly knowledge for social justice – with ordinary people. His ideas on breaking down the barriers that separate the academic elite and the people ‘outside’ or ‘ordinary people’ are incredibly important to the ongoing project of decolonising or democratising institutions of higher learning.

Amber is a doctoral student in the School for Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.  In part compelled by Rodney’s groundings, she uses decolonial and indigenous methodologies to look at stories of struggle, structural violence and resistance in two communities along an oil pipeline in Cameroon.

By AiW Guest: An anonymous academic labourer, somewhere in the South-East of England.

Recently I helped teach a course on South African protest and resistance literature. We looked at fiction and poetry from the late 1970s to the late 80s, from the Soweto uprising to the dying days of apartheid. We read the arguments about commitment and complicity, about realism versus symbolism, about artists as cultural warriors, about judging fiction by how successful it is as a form of protest and not as a literary text. We read about white liberal guilt.

This resonated. For I grew up and was trained as a liberal humanist. I’m white, male, middle-class, from the South-East of England – you could say I followed my destiny. And though I knew ideological interpellation may have played some role in my penchant for novels by melancholic, Euro-Atlantic, middle-class white men whingeing about emptiness or pining for a fictitious past of authentic, organic truth and beauty, I couldn’t, and didn’t, resist the belief that such novels really did express something universal and great. And important. But then, like so many others, I was post-structuralised. I saw otherwise. That modernism was also at the apex of the European enlightenment and its accompanying capitalist colonialist patriarchal, not to say supremacist, ideologies and statements; that liberal humanism had a literary twin, realism; that both were pernicious, blind to themselves and dangerous to boot. Simple. Or maybe not.

But even before I started teaching this course I was troubled by my lack of authority to tell this history, to convey the political significance and importance of this body of writing, (and that you take what work you can when your labour is casualised), about the possibility of applying, with students, European critical frameworks and modes of understanding to these texts, compounded by my knowing that such guilt is irrelevant, useless…

The first novel we read was Sipho Sepamla’s A Ride on the Whirlwind (1981), a revised account of a pivotal moment in the anti-apartheid movement, the ‘tru-truth’ as Sepamla figures it, of the racial violence that began  on the 16^th June 1976 in Soweto. A Ride on the Whirlwind voices a version of events not told in the liberal press, as Mzi – a freedom fighter and hit-man of the liberation movement, who we first see carrying a paper bag of gun parts and grenades hidden under a spray of lurid artificial flowers – is dispatched back to South Africa to assassinate a collaborator with the system.

Index on Censorship, 1983, 12: 12.

Using genre – the political thriller – to interrogate fact, reporting and the silencing that attempted to bury the Soweto Uprising as a controllable ‘South African’ problem, Sepamla’s text was tellingly misread by the censorship board: initially banned after publication because of its ‘historical’, factual account and its ‘idolising of black insurgents’, the ban was later revoked after a successful appeal by the publishers, A.D. Donker – partly because Sepamla’s readership was considered too ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘not intellectual’ enough for the book to pose a threat, its ‘popular’ content deemed too indirect to incite revolutionary acts.

The students didn’t think it was very good. We talk about judgement: knowing that all forms of judgement derive from a position of power, and that with regards to literature, this position is one of a European bourgeois value system that helped to legitimate colonialism in general and apartheid in particular, do we risk these judgements – “It is badly written”, “the characters are thin and somewhat indistinguishable” – or do we treat this novel as special or exceptional, thereby excluding it from conventional critique, reading practices, and all that that may imply, waiting for the punchline to “when is a novel not just a novel” to arrive?

We think about critical sources. As part of his spirited defense of the novel that had been labelled ’third-rate pulp’ in the conservative press on its release, Doc Bikitsha instead noted  that it was surprising to find such a book coming from Sepamla, who in previous poetry and prose favoured less obvious, more artistic routes than overt political activism (The Star, July 27, 1981). We think about availability. “Isn’t all instrumentalised art bound to be bad art?” We think about form. At issue here is that A Ride on the Whirlwind  is written in a realist mode, it is plot driven and formally unremarkable. Beyond the question of popularity or accessibility – of telling it how it is – if read as a realist novel, is A Ride on the Whirlwind not formally legitimising what its content is attempting to challenge? Or, is it by refusing the formal experimentation so beloved of the European tradition that the realism itself becomes the vehicle of its political purpose?

This immersion in formal concern – of these details about realism’s claims to authenticity, of its obfuscation of its own fictionality, partiality, subjective viewpoints – feels secondary to the kinds of questions A Ride on the Whirlwind demands of us in the seminar room in soggy Southern England. But it betrays further questions about the conventional role of literary theory in helping us engage with South African resistance literature of the 1980s, in investigating the positions we are offered, and those that we assume.

These are questions to which I have no answer. But it seems clear that in the UK academy and beyond much more attention needs to be given to South African literature that doesn’t fit into tidy theoretical discourses, that doesn’t illustrate critical theory, and that continues to challenge our most deeply invested systems of value.

Part of an AiW series on teaching in African Studies. The first, by Charlotte Hastings, is here. If you teach a course in the field and would like to contribute, please do contact us africainwords@gmail.com

By AiW Guest: Ross Wignall.

First, from us at AiW, a quick intro to the Sussex Africa Centre, a new initiative in its founding year, celebrating the University of Sussex’s history of international scholarship and engagement with the African continent. Building on Sussex’s long-standing tradition of area studies expertise that is a legacy of AFRAS (African and Asian Studies), the SAC provides a hub and brings together the wide scope of disciplinary interests in cutting-edge and emerging Africa-focused research from across the University. There is a programme of events, including visiting speakers and postgraduate workshops, leading up to the SAC’s official launch at the ASAUK14 conference in September: at AiW we hope to bring as much coverage as we can of these lively and varied papers and discussions.

This, given by James Esson (Loughborough), on migration, ‘football trafficking’ and youth culture, has been covered for us by an SAC PhD member, Ross Wignall, who was also discussant for the paper (and gave us the first photo of the post, taken in The Gambia – below). Further details of Ross and his work and research on youth culture and the role of faith in the Gambia and Brighton can be found at the end of his post.

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Scholars from across the university, from a number of different disciplines including English, Anthropology, Geography and Migration had gathered in the Global Studies Resource centre at Sussex to listen to James Esson present his paper entitled ‘Entrepreneurs of the body?  Ghanaian youth and football trafficking’.

James Esson (Loughborough)

We began with a short introduction by Prof. JoAnn Mcgregor, head of the Sussex Africa Centre, who, having supervised Dr. Esson previously, knew his work well. Esson completed his PhD at UCL on the topic of football trafficking between Ghana and Europe.  He showed how understanding migration through the lens of football provides important insights into the wider conception of mobile African male bodies in development, migration and trafficking discourses. He is currently based at Loughborough University, working as part of a research team on the EU-FP7 African rural-city connections (RurbanAfrica) project. This major research project is a collaboration between researchers based in Denmark, the Netherlands, France, UK, Ghana, Tanzania, Rwanda and Cameroon and is led by the University of Copenhagen. The aim is to explore the connections between rural transformations, mobility, and urbanization processes and analyse how these contribute to an understanding of the scale, nature and location of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, challenging a number of generally accepted ‘truths’ about rural and city development, and the significance of migration in shaping these.

At the Sussex Africa Centre event, Esson gave an introduction to his pathbreaking work on football migration, often termed football trafficking. As he explained this was somewhat misleading as it negated the individual agency of the footballers. A large part of his research is aimed at trying to understand how young footballers are becoming implicated in schemes that encourage migration abroad, mainly through shady intermediaries and agents who offer a trial or lucrative contract with a football academy or club, mainly in Europe but also in the Gulf, Asia and America. In exchange the young footballers are pressured into handing over large sums of cash before finding their dreams dashed when they travel to the foreign football club only to discover they had been part of an elaborate scam.

Esson’s research found that this systematic mobility was much more than a simplistic exploitative relationship and has to be understood in the specific historical, political, economic and cultural context of 21^st Century Ghana. Across Ghana thousands of young men are dropping out of the education system preferring to pursue a career in football. This trend is motivated by a two primary factors. Firstly a failure in education to match up to young men’s expectations of work and future prospects, which has created an aspirational gap, particularly in the context of the continuing uncertainty of the Ghanaian and global economy. Secondly, this has been accentuated by a burgeoning middle class in Ghana where flashy conspicuous consumption has become the primary aspirational goal for achieving success, status and masculine power. As Esson’s research subjects told him, they were following the ‘X-Way’, seeking extraordinary lives defined by wealth and prestige, where they could also refashion their masculine identity.

Michael Essien

He linked this to the global brand of football, where African players such as Ghanaian Michael Essien, live the ‘X-Way’ by being good at football, turning their embodied, physical power into hard cash. As he argued, social mobility now needs to be viewed in tandem with spatial mobility, as switching geographical location has become a vital livelihood option across Ghana and Africa. This is accelerating as young people become more engaged with global media, viewing the riches of the world through the internet, advertising and the behaviour of their sporting role models. However, he kept asserting the need for a more complex and nuanced understanding of these processes which too often see the young migrants as passive victims rather than agents in their own right. He also stressed that in the Ghanaian context families would pressure young men to seize these opportunities, buying into the dreams of their children. This was added to by a historic belief in the power of sport stemming from its use a vehicle for independent Ghanaian identity, further cementing the privileged status of sport as a site of transformation, aspiration and possibility.

Esson’s evocative and, in some terms, provocative paper challenges much current literature on football migration and trafficking and stimulated lively debate at the event. It relates directly to my own work at the YMCA in The Gambia, where I worked on a beginners coaching course with young men. We discussed how Dr. Esson’s work makes a compelling case for re-examining youth discourses that characterise youth as being ‘stuck’ by using the West African context, where young men use sport as one part of a portfolio of livelihood and survival strategies. Other questions addressed wider issues around the concept of ‘trafficking’ itself and how this linked into broader debates over individual agency and complicity, urging a rethink of reductive portraits of exploitative trafficking relationships.

Overall the event was a resounding success and the discussion spilled over into IDS bar over a few, cordial drinks.

Ross Wignall (R.) is a 4^th year Dphil candidate at the University of Sussex in the Anthropology Department. After gaining an English Literature degree and working for several years in government departments, he became involved in charity work. This led into an interest in the Anthropology of Development, especially working with youth, and the role of faith in modern society. His current research ‘Moralities of Transformation’ centres on the role of faith in development, using the YMCA, the largest youth charity in the world as a cross-cultural case study focussing on youth centres in The Gambia and in his home of Brighton and Hove.

Feature photo: ’Velha Guarda’ footballers, Huambo, Angola. By John Spall.

AiW Guest: Ben Verghese.

Africa Writes is the annual literary festival from the Royal African Society – a celebration of contemporary African literature from across the continent and the diaspora, held in early July. Last year (2013), AiW were at the festival covering some key events, but the rhythms and significance of the gathering together of the contemporary London-based poets performing at Africa Writes’ ‘Diaspora Writes Back’ (July 5th, 2013) have stayed with and pursued our guest author Ben Verghese, from London to Cape Town and back…

Leeto Thale. Photo Uta Steinwehr.

“She dances…” Leeto Thale’s words sing, “She dances with so much rhythm…”

Palms open, Leeto’s fingers point up, feeling toward the sky. “This rhythm,” he chants, “this rhythm, oh this rhythm, this rhythm possesses the beauty of life.”

The musicality of Leeto’s writing and performance helped set the tone in an evening of poetry staged at the British Library’s Conference Centre.

By bringing together four contrasting individuals, “four award-winning London-based African poets”, the organisers of the 2013 Africa Writes Festival succeeded in presenting four maturing voices with a range of personal narratives who, collectively, help reflect the everyday diversity of 21^st Century London.

Warsan Shire. Photo Ben Elwyn.

As Warsan Shire stepped up there was a notable hush through the auditorium, the entrancing tones of her wispy London-accent punctuated by the click click of cameras.

The audience stayed transfixed throughout Warsan’s readings, or rather spoken word performances. The newly appointed Young Poet Laureate for London’s expressions and gestures, as well as captivating performance, caused both giggles and gulps of reflection as she voiced her distinct spread of delicate, evocative subject matter for which she is becoming more and more known. Did Warsan really ask her mum that? Yes, maybe Rihanna does have a plan!  And, ah,  Johnny with the blue eyes, who “came with a bag of tools he’d used on other women”. “Silly boy, remember him?” Warsan asks, “Now he’s tied to the radiator of my basement,” music playing “to drown him out.”

Returning to Leeto’s delivery, for the most part his flow manages to keep a distance from conventional, clichéd vocal patterns poets can oh-to-often succumb to when reciting works in English. Tellingly, during the Q&A, Leeto spoke of the importance of rhythm within his creation process, “I’ve got to hear drums, I’ve got to hear hi-hats” echoing Warsan’s way of putting pen to paper – “I only write to music”.

Nii Parkes, Warsan Shire, Leeto Thale, Nick Makoha with chair & founder of the Brunel University Poetry Prize Bernardine Evaristo. Photo Fadil Elobeid.

“I’m writing in a language I wasn’t beaten in!” Nii Ayikwei Parkes jested, following chairperson Bernardine Evaristo’s question to open the panel discussion, on how the poets’ craft is shaped by having each been born in an African country, or not, yet basing themselves elsewhere as an “African poet of the diaspora”.

As if the audience were not there, Nick Makoha directly thanked Bernardine for helping him find his own voice. The seated conversation highlighted Bernardine’s significance as a mentor to the generation(s) of writers on stage. Jacob Sam-La Rose and all at The Complete Works merit similar plaudits.

Nick Makoha and Bernadine Evaristo. Photo Ben Elwyn.

Also worthy of the applause that came its way on the night is Flipped Eye, the independent publishing house founded by Nii and through which Warsan and Nick have had works printed. If you are yet to handle that printed matter, Flipped Eye’s anthology of the individual author pamphlet series, The Mouthmark Book of Poetry is a strong starting point (including, among others, Shire and Makoha).

Photo Ben Elwyn.

Perhaps an inevitability of the whole Festival’s continental framing, compounded by its location in a conference theatre at the British Library, was a repeated suggestion that areas addressing mixed heritage and identities were “African” conditions. With Stuart Hall in mind, that the “fully unified, completed, secure, and coherent identity is a fantasy”, the insistence on claiming continental ownership over such matters came up too often for my liking. Cannot such supposed “African conditions” be recognised as issues which can impact on anyone, beyond boundaries of the continent either of their birth or upbringing? Another comparative difficulty which also repeatedly reared up over the course of the weekend was the continued usage of “African” as a collective noun in a way “European” or “South American” was not (and rarely is). In any walk of life, commonalities can be found but from many of the participants at a literary event I had hoped for less monochromatic views of a continent’s vastness and complexities.

Warsan Shire receiving the Brunel University African Poetry Prize. Photo Uta Steinwehr.

Perhaps both of these contentions are particularly diasporic concerns (African or otherwise), uncertainties from the befuddlement of living with, as Nii put it, “not just two eyes.” And with this more than duality, the Diaspora Writes Back spoke back, crisscrossing multiple rhythms, flows, languages, locations. The event ended buoyantly with Bernadine catching Warsan off-guard and presenting her with an FA Cup-sized trophy for being the first winner of the inaugural Brunel University  African Poetry Prize.

A worthwhile evening with local and global relevance, fingers crossed the night can grow as an on-going part of the annual summertime Africa Writes programme.

Ben Verghese is a writer/journalist based between London and Cape Town.

Audio extracts from ‘Diaspora Writes Back’ have been made available by Africa Writes here. 

By AiW Guest: Francesca Salvi.

Offering three presentations from different department across the University of Sussex, the second postgraduate Sussex Africa Centre event, “Emerging Research Landscapes II”, furthered its aims of showcasing Africa-focused postgraduate research from a variety of perspectives, illustrating the diversity of research being carried out in the University.

We were very lucky to have Jeremy Allouche (IDS) chairing this event, who has 14 years of experience in managing and designing projects in the fields of water governance, security and development, and international political economy analysis, recently focusing on West Africa and the Horn of Africa.

The afternoon kicked off with Wezi Mwangulube, based in the Department of Education. Through her paper entitled  ‘Understanding HIV Education in a Developing Country Context: A case study of life skills based HIV (LSBE) curriculum in one Malawian junior secondary school’, Wezi discussed some methodological pre-fieldwork implications of her study on HIV education. Focusing on the development of the national curriculum, her analysis looks to issues such as consistency in methods of teaching children about safe sex across different classes and with different teachers, and the possibilities of open discussions of HIV and sex with kids from within Malawian society and culture, both at school and at home.  Wezi’s presentation encouraged questions from attendees, which engaged with the conceptualisation of education and the age/gender differentials in the spreading of HIV/AIDS.

Wezi was followed by Caitriona Dowd (Geography), an expert in Islamic militancy with the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset) project, whose paper, ‘The Emergence of Violent Groups: Branding, Scale and the Conflict Marketplace in Sub-Saharan Africa’, argued that ethnic diversity and ethnic political power relations emerge as important interacting factors in religious identity conflict. Downplaying the cultural specificity of Islam as particularly prone to violence and moving beyond the pathologising of Islamist violence as transnational and, so, diffusional, Caitriona’s impressive quantitative data exposes the significance of competition and the ‘branding’ of groups in specific spaces and localities, where religion is mobilised to challenge marginalisation by other means.  Her case studies are cross-national, violent Islamist groups in Kenya and Nigeria and though her analysis focuses more broadly on sub-Saharan Africa, its insights may be of value beyond this geographical field, as discussed via the numerous questions raised by attendees.

Lastly, Machiko Tsubura, from the IDS, presented her research, ’Accountability and Clientelism in Dominant Party Politics: The Case of a Constituency Development Fund in Tanzania’, on why a Constituency Development Fund (CDF), was introduced in Tanzania in 2009. As a formal route for the previously privately funded patronage of MPs who, as Machiko demonstrated, acted as benefactors for a range of funding requests from their constituents – from letters asking for school desks and equipment to those of a more personal nature, such as the letter, with photo included, from a hospital patient seeking funds to purchase his own prosthetic legs – the CDF in Tanzania was implemented to centrally manage and restrict the power of MPs by law. With some other CDF programmes across the world closing after relatively short periods or being withdrawn completely due to the abuse of funds, Machiko’s paper also raised the spectre of corruption via Tanzania’s ‘List of Shame’ disclosed prior to the elections in 2010, raising further questions about the role of the CDF in Tanzania as an instrument of clientelism.  Machiko presented just one week before her official Viva exam, and the roundness of her thesis was clear, so we have no doubts she will perform to the best of her abilities. Nonetheless, we wish her the best of luck!

The three presentations struck a chord with many of the attendees, who engaged in lively discussions by asking questions and raising different points, often bringing in examples and insights from their own work. SAC’s events continue to excel as informal spaces for interdisciplinary discussions of current doctoral research. Presence of attendees from both the University of Sussex and University of Brighton suggest SAC is quickly becoming a way to integrate the two institutions, and we look forward to increasing attendance from beyond academia as well.

After the discussion, the party left the Global Studies Resource Centre for the IDS bar, where Zimbaremabwe, a Brighton-based Zimbabwean musical collective led by Linos Wengara Magaya, played live. This offered the perfect chance to engage with yet another dimension of African identity, and relax in a very friendly environment. Although not all of the attendees were able to join, the social offered a pleasant surprise to other guests at the IDS bar, including a couple of young children, who very much enjoyed some African rhythm!

We hope that the openness and informality of this event, coupled with the high quality and diversity of the presentations offered, will have remained with those who took part beyond the end of the day, inspiring more meaningful research. We also look forward to our next event on Monday the 31^st March, when the Sussex Africa Centre in collaboration with the School of English will be hosting an exciting and immersive interactive event exploring contemporary research into public spaces and popular cultures across Africa.

See #SACPhD @AfricainWords for live tweets from the event – with thanks to John Spall.

Francesca Salvi is currently completing her thesis on in-school pregnancy in Mozambique at the University of Sussex, Dept of Education. Her work explores meanings attached to pregnancy as it occurs among young people in education – considering in particular, how these meanings allow young people to navigate different normative frameworks and construct their identity in a context of multiple modernities.

Francesca strongly believes in multitasking, hence she grabs every chance of contributing to various aspects of university life, such as contributing to the Sussex Africa Centre.