LITERATURE, CULTURE, AND THOUGHT IN AFRICA: A CONVERSATION WITH ABIOLA IRELE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Abiola Irele is clearly one of the leading African literary and cultural critics of our time. From achieving what in Nigeria was a pioneer feat of attending the nation’s premier university, the University College, Ibadan (UCI) at its earliest years, also attended by famous Nigerian writers, Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo (writers popularly called the Ibadan Boys), to being among the first set of African critics of modern Nigerian and African literature. As a student and an up-and-coming scholar, Irele was editor (1958-60) of The Horn, a journal that provided opportunity to the UCI students from virtually all disciplines to participate in the vibrant literary atmosphere developing then at Ibadan. Later on as Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages at his Alma matter, now the University of Ibadan, Irele was in the forefront of the efforts to revise the French curriculum and ensure it reflected African culture and traditions and the literary aspirations of the students.

Abiola Irele specializes in Anglophone and Francophone Black African and Caribbean literature. He attended the University College Ibadan, the University of London, and the University of Paris. Irele also held teaching assignments at the University of Lagos, the University of Ife, the University of Ghana, the Ohio State University, and currently at Harvard University. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Dakar, Overseas Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, and the Andrew Mellon Visiting Professor at Tulane University.

Irele was President of the African Literature Association from 1992 to 1993. He served on committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA): chaired the Francophone Studies Committee; and was elected to the nominating committee. He has also been active in the Southern African Praise Poetry Project. Irele’s famous Inaugural lecture at the University of Ibadan, In Praise of Alienation, has been widely cited by scholars and students of literature around the world. His recent book, The African Imagination, literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, was published by the Oxford University Press in 2001. His other books include, Lectures africaines: a prose anthology of African writing in French, Heinemann, 1969; Literature and ideology in Martinique: René Maran, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon,1972; Selected Poems of Leopold Sedar Senghor, Cambridge University Press, 1977; Theatre in Africa, Ibadan University Press, 1978; The African Experience in Literature and Ideology, Heinemann, 1981; Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, New Horn Press, 1994; Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Ohio State University Press, 2000; and New voices in African literature, Indiana University Press, 1995. Irele is the immediate past editor of Research in African Literatures, and with Simon Gikandi, edited the Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature. Irele has also served as editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature, and Cambridge Studies in African and Caribbean Literature.

Commenting on his latest book, The African Imagination: Literature in Africa and the Black Diaspora, Biodun Jeyifo lauds, "The quality of mind and imagination revealed in the essays in this book on the African imagination confirm Abiola Irele's status as the doyen of Africanist literary scholars worldwide… It will undoubtedly take its place as one of the most significant acts of sustained intellectual reflection on the articulations between African letters and cultural modernity in the last three or four decades." Simon Gikandi, still on the book, says,

Sanya Osha appreciates, among other things, how Irele contributes to the language debate in terms of the current tendency to overvalue the printed word.

My first interview with Professor Irele was for CJSR Radio station at the University of Alberta, Canada, when, in 1998, Irele visited the campus as Keynote Speaker for the Africa Society’s 1st Annual Conference. Another opportunity came up at the African Studies Association meeting in November 2001 at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and we had excellent conversation about the political changes then sweeping across Africa, and about African writers and African literary scholarship around the world.

The present conversation with Professor Irele took place in May 2003 with a wonderful opportunity to visit with him at Columbus, Ohio, as part of my Elaloro Discourse project. Irele had just clocked sixty-seven, and his appointment to Harvard had been announced. Professor Irele was at his best during our conversations, effortlessly invoking his uniquely rich and long memories and responding to most current literary issues of our time, especially those on African literature in a global century.

Here, then, is my latest conversation with professor Irele, my questions in Italics, and his responses following after each question. This conversation, as others I have had with writers and critics to date, was spontaneous: neither prepared questions nor previously drafted and rehearsed answers. Despite the spontaneity, Professor Irele’s responses were thorough and thought-provoking. His experiences as editor, critic, scholar, thinker and teacher show clearly in the ways he handles each issues and explores each examples with dazzling competence.

Today is Saturday May 24, 2003, here in Columbus, Ohio. It is my pleasure to talk to Professor Abiola Irele. By the way, Happy Birthday to you!

Yes, but let me just point out that May 24 always rings a bell for those of us who grew up under the British colonial regime, because it used to be Empire Day. May 24^th was Queen Victoria’s birthday (that’s why it’s called Victoria Day in Canada) and it was declared a public holiday to celebrate the British empire with parades, marches, sports and other festivities. All this empire thing had tremendous significance for us at the time. You will recall that Achebe pointed out in an essay that he was named for Queen Victoria, at least indirectly, because he was called Albert, the name of her consort. In fact, it was not unusual to name children after the English royal family or colonial personalities. In my own family, my twin siblings who were born in 1946 were named George and Elizabeth, after the king and his wife at the time of their birth.

I'm happy that you brought out the significance of this day. I knew absolutely nothing about it but I'm glad to be informed. Let me start this conversation by congratulating you on your appointment at Harvard. It's a great achievement not only for you but also for all African scholars. I don't think there's another person in African Literature who deserves to be in Harvard at this time more than you.

Well, I won't go that far. All I can say is that I'm very happy to be going to Harvard. I visited there before, it's a great university, and there is serious, very serious intellectual work going on at the DuBois center and the Department of Afro-American Studies, which as we know has now changed its name to African and African-American Studies. I ought to add that the department has a policy of joint appointments and that my other department at Harvard is Romance Languages and Literatures. I’ve found a remarkable openness to Francophone studies and even enthusiasm. I’m really going there to add my efforts to a development that’s already underway.

Do you have some plans or some areas that you'd really like to focus on? Especially since Harvard is just opening up to African Studies. Can we say that it's, for them, an important development having you there?

Again, I wouldn’t go that far. As a matter of fact, African Studies is not exactly a new thing at Harvard. They had a first appointment in African Studies many years ago, in the sixties, with the appointment of Professor Kenneth Onwuka Dike as professor of African history. However, there has been a break, so that we can say Harvard is picking up the thread again with the renaming of the Afro-American Studies department. It's interesting to see that it’s Skip Gates who has taken the initiative for this change so the department can fully incorporate African Studies.

Let’s talk a bit more about that--the change of Harvard’s Afro-American Studies to African and African American Studies Department. It seems the same development is going on in other universities here in the United States. Are we now witnessing a new trend—a very positive trend for African Studies?

Yes, there is indeed a trend in American universities towards an emphasis on the black Diaspora in its connection with Africa. At Tulane University in New Orleans, the department is called African and Diaspora Studies. The African-American Studies department at Indiana University has also been renamed African American and Diaspora Studies. At Maryland you have a whole center of Diaspora Studies headed by my good friend Eileen Julien.

You’re not forgetting I hope that your own department at Ohio State changed its name, too, from Black Studies to African American and African Studies. Same thing at Michigan State University.

Exactly. So there’s now a new emphasis in American universities: a diaspora emphasis, if you like. There is indeed a clear pattern here. The idea now is to highlight the connection, the continuum, between Africa and its Diaspora. One important consequence I expect of this trend will be to bring the Caribbean and Latin American dimension of African American Studies into greater prominence. Black Studies as instituted tended to focus on North America and to neglect these other areas of the black experience. Quite understandable, given the outgrowth of Black Studies from the civil rights struggle, but that’s too limited now. We must emphasize those other areas of Diaspora history and experience. Think of the determining role of Caribbean writers and intellectuals in the black awakening and intellectual tradition: Sylvester Williams, Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, C.L.R. James; on the francophone side, Césaire, Price-Mars, Fanon, Glissant. One could go on and on. Think too of the vitality of the African derived cultures in Brazil and Cuba. This wider Diaspora consciousness is implied by the name change at Harvard.

But you see, the interesting thing at Harvard is that this development revolves around the personality of Skip Gates. Gates has always had a very strong African sense, perhaps even an African passion. This is why he undertook the Encyclopedia Africana project, which he co-edited with Kwame Appiah. I don’t know how many people have seen the Encyclopedia—it’s a marvelous achievement, in terms of the technology involved and the wealth of material it contains. And despite the controversy it generated, the same can be said of the three part series he did for the BBC and PBS on Africa. I remember watching the second episode and the scene at Timbuktu where he unearthed the ancient manuscripts there. A tremendous find, absolutely incredible. I’m told that the manuscripts are now being catalogued and digitalized. It didn’t surprise me, therefore, that Skip embraced the trend towards bringing together African and African-American Studies. It’s a connection now being fully recognized by the name change in the department. I think too that it’s important to point out that a major vocation of the department is the teaching of African languages. Harvard now has an African Language program with a full time Director in the person of Dr. John Mugane.

But beyond the department, Harvard has had a Committee on African Studies, which has been in existence for some time and is currently chaired by the Ghanaian historian Professor Emmanuel Akyeampong. This committee functions as a Center of African Studies and I understand it has been provided with resources for expansion, for example, to develop an African collection at the central library at Harvard, the Widener. With these developments at Harvard, African Studies is going to be given a powerful lift. As you’ve remarked, that’s a very positive trend for us and also of course for African American Studies. So, to go back to what I said earlier on, I’m very happy to be going to Harvard at this time, and I hope to be able to contribute there to what I see as a momentous development.

At this point, I’m not really thinking so much of initiating any projects as taking some outstanding ones with me there, writing projects rather than research. I hope to complete a critical study of Senghor for the “The Cambridge Series on African and Caribbean Literature.” Also, I plan to work on a study of francophone African thought to expand and update my previous articles on Negritude into a comprehensive study of francophone African thought. The interest of the book is that it will take account of the work of the younger generation of francophone intellectuals, such as Achille Mbembe and Jean-Godefroy Bidima.

There are, however, two current projects I think I should mention because of what I consider their significance for African literature. As you know, I've been editing The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, with Simon Gikandi as co-editor. This is a collective work in two volumes, which is scheduled to appear early in 2004. There is also the Norton Anthology of African Literature, which I'm putting together with Skip Gates and a team of period and area editors: for me, a truly exciting project. The significance of these two projects is the impact they are likely to have on the canon of African literature.

Well, it’s a question of determining who are the significant writers in the development of African literature from a historical and thematic point of view and what gets accepted as the central texts. This has come up in the discussion we’ve had in the past year about what to include in the Norton. There’s a whole dossier, quite interesting I think, of the correspondence that’s been going on by email between us about the relative importance or merits of this or that author or the value or significance of this or that text. After much argument, we’ve arrived at a consensus. I’m of course aware that the choices we’ve made are not necessarily definitive, but I’m convinced that on the whole, they represent the essential canon of African literature.

Well, one implication of your appointment to Harvard is that you will cease to be editor of Research in African Literatures (RAL), which, as everyone knows, you have taken to new heights. I’m really interested in your experience as editor... you know, the kind of philosophy that informed everything that you did in RAL. In what shape do you think you're leaving the journal?

Before I answer that question, let me just make a point about my tenure as editor of RAL. I first got an appointment as chair of Africana Studies at Stony Brooks before my appointment at Harvard came through. At that point I announced to Ohio State that I was leaving and could they think about new arrangements for RAL, but the administration at Ohio State was not particularly interested in keeping RAL. In the long run, some arrangement was made with Indiana University Press, with John Conteh Morgan taking over as editor. In fact, the press went to great lengths to convince the Ohio State administration to retain the journal. They offered to make a substantial input into the management of the journal so as to keep it going. If only I had known the Harvard appointment would come through, I would have proposed it to Harvard, you see, so it would have continued at Harvard. This would definitely have been a much better arrangement, because I can tell you this: I had lots of problems with Ohio State University over that journal. As soon as the dean at the time I took over the editorship departed, I began to encounter difficulties with his successors, who were no longer willing to support the journal. Its significance was not appreciated by the incoming administration. I can say this without any contradiction. I have kept copies of all of the correspondence between the administration and me on the subject of RAL. I got the distinct impression that the attitude to the journal was part of a general attitude of indifference to Black Studies at Ohio State, a lack of esteem, which affected African Studies and accounts for the failure to appreciate the value of RAL to the university and literary studies generally.

Now, what I was trying to do with RAL was to make it into a major critical journal. When Bernth Lindfors started RAL at the University of Texas at Austin in the late sixties and was conceived by him in rather narrow terms, as a research tool devoted to compiling bibliographies, reporting on conferences, and reviewing new books—it had an extensive book review section, but this was given over entirely to the secondary literature. We still have a policy of reviewing only secondary literature, never primary works. I was in fact planning to do away with this policy. Anyway, the initial focus of the journal was the incidental and extrinsic aspects of African Literature. That’s how the journal got its name. Then, a few years later, sometime in the seventies, Lindfors sent out a circular asking for our opinion of the journal. Some of us responded by saying we would like to see it transformed into a critical journal, and that’s how he began to publish critical articles. Those early articles form quite an interesting body of work and helped to establish directions for African criticism. The point then is that RAL had already become a major critical journal when it was brought to Ohio. The original publishers, Texas University Press, were no longer interested in the journal, and Lindfors himself reckoned he’d lived with it long enough. The editorial office was transferred to Ohio State just about the time I arrived there, with Richard Bjornson as editor and Josaphat Kubayanda as his associate. Unfortunately, Kubayanda passed away late 1991, in fact on Thanksgiving Day, and Bjornson himself followed less than a year later in the summer of 1992. It was in these sad circumstances that I took up the editorship.

What I then did was really to continue to do the work begun by Bjornson and Kubayanda. Because, even though I wasn't identified as a member of the editorial team, I was in fact quite actively working with both of them. We had regular meetings together, often over beer at the Faculty club, went through the manuscripts together, and so on. So I had that opportunity to continue the policy that we had mapped out, to give the journal a new orientation. One of the ways in which we were able to do this was to publish special numbers. The fear was expressed that maybe these numbers would be restricted to a particular theme in each case and therefore would not interest the ordinary reader, that the ordinary reader may not find the particular theme we've chosen to be immediately relevant to his or her research work, but it turned out that the special numbers were very successful. They were very important in giving the journal a new and distinctive profile. Related to this was the fact that we consciously sought to expand the scope of the journal beyond a narrow understanding of the term “literature.” Even though the journal is called Research in African Literatures, I took the term "literature" in the broad sense of “discourse.” There was an effort to extend this to mean various forms of cultural expression, so we began to publish articles on music, on art, and then moved on to do special numbers on these other topics.

We had other plans. For instance, I had a special number in the works on Literature and History to focus precisely on the theoretical issue of oral history and ways in which history as narrative in the African context can hardly be distinguished from imaginative expression. I’d been reading Hayden White and was struck by the relevance of his ideas to modes of historical narrative in the African oral tradition. The premise here is that historical narrative can never be an exact record of past. There can never, strictly speaking, be an integral recollection of the past, so that history, whether oral or written, involves the intervention of rhetorical and narrative strategies. The historical characters you're evoking would assume a certain fictional character. They have to be made up in the original sense of the word. Often, with us, in Africa, they emerged as mythical figures, so that history is in many ways the result of a creative activity. This is something I’d learned long ago, from my first history lessons as a boy. I talk about this in my essay “Narrative, History and The African Imagination.” I was hoping then that we might be able to do a special number to examine all this, but unfortunately François Manchuelle, whom I’d asked to guest edit the number, died in the TWA air crash of 1996. So we weren't able to complete that particular project

I wanted to broaden the scope of the journal and make it more of a cultural studies journal, into a forum of intellectual discussion, a journal of ideas. One of the special numbers I was planning has to do with the nature of ethnographic discourse. I've already contacted a number of people who have agreed to contribute to this, and I still hope that Conteh-Morgan will consider doing this special number.

I'm glad to say that the editorial policy I’ve described has worked quite well. A sign of this perhaps is that the subscription rate went up, quite significantly I think. We were very fortunate to have had Indiana as our publishers, because they managed the journal extremely well, and this was a major factor in its success.

You've also made an effort to include the Diaspora, to bring in issues that relate to the Black Atlantic, for example.

Yes, that has always been a major preoccupation of mine, but we wanted to make sure of not duplicating the work of other journals. Here, I'm thinking of Callaloo, which has a strong Diaspora focus. They've done things on African authors, which is, of course, our major area, but I didn't want to get into African American Literature, which is well catered for in other ways. We've always sort of concentrated on the African continent and the Caribbean: those have been our two primary areas. However, we've carried reviews of books on the greater Diaspora and we’ve been planning a special number on African and African-American responses. You know, the connections we talked about earlier. We know it exists, but we cannot just take it for granted. We need to explore this in some depth. I’ve personally invested in this subject, which was the theme of the series of lectures I delivered at Harvard in the spring of 2000 under the title “The Black Utopia: Diaspora Thought and African Renewal.” I was looking at the ways in which Diaspora intellectuals, particularly in the United States, projected a certain image of Africa as homeland, the symbolisms they employed in a discourse of African regeneration as part of the vindication of the black race. This is a major aspect of African-American intellectual history. I thought we could have a special number on this theme, which is related to the whole question of the Black Atlantic.

This brings me to Gilroy. The concept of the Black Atlantic is intriguing, but I don't think that Gilroy has really explored this in his book as fully as he should have. He considers the work of Du Bois and concentrates basically on Richard Wright, on his contribution to the universal debate on modernity beyond the race issue. Gilroy then goes on to propose a Black British model of cultural expression, but he leaves out the African dimension entirely. This is a major weakness of the book, because it’s inconceivable to propound a theory of the Black Atlantic and leave out the idea of Africa. Besides, the concept is not comprehensive enough. If you want to apply it to the worldwide black experience, there are black people in Peru, on the Pacific rim, and in the Middle East. Where do they come in? The term Black Diaspora is more adequate.

And Africa is not just the source; it continues to inform events in the Diaspora, to influence whatever is happening to black communities outside the continent.

Quite so. The problem with Gilroy is that he was much more concerned with his own problems as a Black British. This is what he wrote about in his first book. This concern is apparent in The Black Atlantic where he was also pushing the Black British thing, but his arguments were not, in the long run, very convincing. The other book he's written, Against Race, is frankly regrettable. His attack on Marcus Garvey is in my view deplorable. The purely negative image he presents of Marcus Garvey in that book betrays a total lack of historical understanding, the particular situation Garvey and others like him were confronted with. So I have my problems with Gilroy, but I think the concept of the Black Atlantic could be an extremely useful one as long as we bear in mind its theoretical and practical limitations.

I'd like us to move on, to talk about Nigerian literature. Let’s consider the first Ibadan generation, as they are sometimes called, those like you who received an education that was mainly Eurocentric. So I want you to go down "memory lane," as they say . . .

Well, going down memory lane, I've done that already, in the Introduction to a volume by J.P. Clark, who is a longstanding friend of mine. It took me a long time to write about him at all, because of that closeness: you know, we were in college together, graduated the same year. But then Howard University Press, which published his collected works, offered me the opportunity. Mrs. Essien-Udom, who was the editor at Howard University Press, was responsible for the project, and when she asked me to write this introduction, I accepted at once. This was an opportunity for me to revisit that period when Nigerian Literature was beginning to take shape at Ibadan. It was a very significant period in the development of African Literature; you might even call it a minor renaissance.

But apart from Nigerian writing, apart from the early writing that was beginning there, Ibadan also provided a discovery of Francophone African and Caribbean literature—- of the Negritude writers. We were introduced to them by the journal Black Orpheus, which was being published in town by the Ministry of Education and edited by Ulli Beier. Prior to that, Olumbe Bassir, who was a professor of Biochemistry at Ibadan, brought out an anthology of West African verse published by Ibadan University Press. That anthology is now a classic. It included translations from the French of poems by the Negritude poets, especially Senghor. People don't remember these publications now, but these were pioneering efforts that mapped African literature initially. It was at this time, to be precise in 1957, that we started the student paper The Horn.

Coming to our education, you're right to say it was very Eurocentric. In my case, it was decidedly so, because I grew up a Catholic, but I'm not prepared to repudiate that education. It was after all the only one available to us at the time, and when all is said and done, it was a very good education. In some ways it was even valuable: it gave you a certain broad view of the world, so I don’t consider any of it a waste, for instance, the eight years I spent studying Latin. But one must admit that it doesn't make you African; it displaces you. Those of us who received that colonial education, and I include people like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, we had to rediscover our African background ourselves. It’s very important to bear that in mind. We had to come back and relearn our own traditions—sometimes even, to tell the truth, to relearn our own languages. I was fortunate to have done my early education in Yoruba in the primary school, but all of my education later on was in English. I’m aware this tends to have a lasting effect on your cast of mind, at the very least it determines elements of your system of references, so we had to go and learn our languages properly—particularly the proverbs. You know, because it's amazing what the proverbs represent in African languages. They function first of all as repositories of thought in Yoruba culture and then they are what I would call meta-linguistic in nature. That is, they are refinements upon the forms of the language. Therefore, proverbs give you a mastery of the language. They enable a certain level of discourse in the language itself. So as I was saying, we had to relearn our languages at this higher level. Now, when I came to read Chinua Achebe, I could see the results of the re-education he had to undergo. I think Death and the King's Horseman represents really a summation of that process of re-education, because when you read Death and the King's Horseman in English, you know that you are reading Yoruba transposed into English—a magnificent transposition.

You’ve used the word “renaissance.” Apart from J.P. Clark, who were the people involved in the movement at Ibadan. What was their contribution? What did they achieve?

Apart from J.P. Clark, there was first of all Christopher Okigbo. Chris, as we called him, had left the university when I entered Ibadan in 1957, but he was living close by teaching Latin at Fiditi Grammar School about twenty miles north of Ibadan on the Oyo road. J.P. brought one of his first poems to us, very heavily influenced by Eliot, and we published it in The Horn. As you know, he subsequently grew into a major voice. Soyinka also published some of his early work in the paper, but our contributions came mainly from students in the English department. I’d like to mention two in particular: Minji Karibo, who wrote poems of a very lyrical quality, and Mark Akpoyoware, who wrote in a rather introspective manner. Then there was the experimental poem in pidgin by Frank Imoukhuede. Some of that early work was later brought together by Martin Banham in Nigerian Student Verse. Banham, by the way, was one of our lecturers and also very involved with The Horn. In fact, the idea of starting the paper came from him.

As you were going through your degree program, did you have any idea at that time of writing that could be called a Modern Nigerian Literature?

There was no Nigerian literature to speak of at that time, no, but it was coming into existence under our very eyes so to speak. There is no doubt at all that there was a certain conscious effort to create a literature in English that would have specific local references. I’ve pointed this out in regard to the poems J.P. Clark was writing in those days, in my Introduction to the Howard University Press volume. All those who were at Ibadan in my time, all of them wrote specifically with the idea of creating a new literature. A literature written in English but Nigerian, not merely in its cultural references, but also even in what I might call its tonality. But our only models were the canonical writers in our English curriculum. I remember writing a sonnet at the time as an exercise. It was published in The Horn, and I remember my professor, Molly Mahood, sending me a note to comment on it. She is another person who played an important role in keeping The Horn going, I mean, this is hardly ever mentioned, but she was a major factor in its fortunes. Molly Mahood was the Professor of English at Ibadan during my student days there. She went on to start the department of Literature at Dar-es-Salaam. She’s now retired, living in a beautiful house overlooking some of the finest landscape in Sussex.

Yes, that’s the name. This is by the way an occasion for me to acknowledge her input. She subsidized the publication of New Horn. It came out then in what used to be known as cyclostyled form. We did all the typing ourselves, but she bought us the stencils and the paper out of her own personal funds… so she read this poem of mine, a sonnet in the Elizabethan manner, and she did a wonderful critique of it. J.P. Clark came up to Ibadan with a completed novel in his bag, you know, a novel heavily dependent on the English tradition of fiction. So we also did that: we imitated, if you like, because, you see, we knew we had to write in English, so we had to go to the established models. Ultimately, there was no doubt about the direction all of that activity was taking—it was clearly meant to create a Nigerian Literature. No question at all about that.

At what stage would you say modern Nigerian Literature properly speaking emerged? Not only that. As it was being written, you know, as it was being consciously created, as you say, what kinds of responses were there? Did the writers have an audience in mind, like whom were they targeting? And what were the kinds of things that you were trying to say and encourage? And how was the readership developing?

Let me take the question of readership first. The readership, obviously, was limited. It was basically made up of students. I'm talking now about the production at Ibadan University, you know. It was a student audience. The paper was very modest. We rolled them out and stapled them together. I don't remember now how many copies we printed, but they were all bought. Mostly by students in the English department, but students in other departments also bought The Horn and read it, although it was devoted almost entirely to poetry, so there was an audience. There’s an explanation for this. When you came to University College, Ibadan (UCI, as we called it then), even if you’d come to read History, you would have done two other subjects at “A” level, often English Literature and Latin. Students who were in other disciplines retained a certain interest in Literature, so they bought The Horn quite regularly. But it was a limited audience, you see, and it was an audience that the early writers addressed directly because you had common references. Let me explain again. Take J.P. Clark. Many of his poems were highly influenced by G.M. Hopkins. Now, Hopkins was regularly on the “A” level syllabus in the 1950’s, so you would know exactly what was going on in J.P. Clark's poetry. I’ve mentioned the influence of Eliot on Okigbo, but he was also steeped in the Classical tradition, professionally. Now, many of us had also done “A” level Latin, so his allusions were often familiar. One of the most important Latin references was the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, which some of us had encountered in Virgil.

There was an educated audience, beyond the university, of former students, alumni of Ibadan, who were also responsive to the new literature, including incidentally the novels of Amos Tutuola. Contrary to what has been said, Tutuola received early recognition in Nigeria. It was Mr. Olayide, my first English teacher in high school, a Nigerian, who first drew my attention to The Palm Wine Drinkard, and this was in 1952, at its publication. This was the audience that immediately responded to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart when it appeared in 1958. I go into all this because people still cling to this idea that the readership of African Literature is outside Africa. Even Michael Chapman, the professor in South Africa, has restated this view in a recent article in RAL, but it’s not true at all. The crisis now facing Heinemann African Writer's Series (and this is no digression) proves the point. The African readership that has sustained that series can no longer afford it, with the result that Heinemann is faced with a crisis. So to come back to the question: there was a local readership for the new literature, a first circle within the university and a second circle among the new bourgeoisie that was emerging, formed mainly by Ibadan graduates, like my old mathematics teacher in Saint Gregory's who read novels--both English novels (Somerset Maugham, H.E. Bates, stuff like that; I remember he was bowled over by Graham Greene’s The Power and The Glory) and also the new literature in Nigeria. It was for people like him that Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City was serialized in the Lagos Daily Times in the fifties. Then there was a third circle, the external readership.

Now, the writers addressed the immediate audience in Nigeria or Africa. They did not address the European audience consciously. However, it is true that at times, some of these writers would need to provide some kind of explanation of what they were doing, for some of their own references, because quite often, cultural features in the Nigerian context were not necessarily shared by everybody. So if you made an allusion to Oyin, the Ijaw goddess, you have to explain this to a Yoruba person, but there were also many concepts that were common to our various cultures. I think any African can read Things Fall Apart without needing any editorial apparatus. When you see ogbanje you don’t have to be told that this is abiku; you understood immediately. Let me emphasize the point that our writers had an immediate local audience in mind. They addressed that immediate audience in terms that were, by and large, familiar to that audience.

A very important point arises here, and that is, the literature had a bearing on very urgent cultural and political concerns and I’m not talking only about its relation to nationalism. Let me illustrate using Things Fall Apart as an example. We all know the novel is a response to European imperialism, but it’s also, as I have argued, a critical reappraisal of the traditional African culture. Achebe is employing the novel as a mode of discourse, a medium of reflection on the African historical being. Now, this was something that touched many people. When the book appeared in 1958, there were many Nigerian readers, a great number of them Ibo, who were very uncomfortable with the critical aspects of Things Fall Apart. I remember discussions of the work at the time when people voiced their discomfort about the figure of Okonkwo as a character. In a sense then, Achebe succeeded in touching a collective nerve. Let's consider another book: A Man of the People. Now, what is A Man of the People, but the writer reflecting on the political situation in post-independence Nigeria? Who is he addressing if not his countrymen, Nigerians? Now, if other people, if Europeans, if English people, French people listen, that's well and good, but that's not his main concern. A Man of the People is intended precisely to reveal to us the critical nature of our postcolonial, post-independence situation. It does not provide immediate answers. It is true the book ends with a coup, but I’m sure the last thing Achebe would have liked to have seen was a coup. At the time he wrote the novel, all through the fifties and the sixties, and even well into the seventies, the exemplar of political instability was Latin America. Everybody knew that, and Achebe certainly had the Latin America situation very much in mind when he gave that ending to his book. It was really a warning to us. In the event, it came too late. We in Africa have taken over from Latin America.

But what about the foreign audience? I mean those who look at African literature in the European languages as part of European literature. I'm now talking about the foreign scholar who is reviewing writing from Nigeria and who feels qualified to make some assertions about this literature because it is written in English, to pronounce on it. Did the response from foreign critics have any influence on Nigerian writing?

I’ve remarked before that our conception of African literature presupposes a dissociation between language and geography, language and cultural milieu. In principle, African literature in English is accessible to anybody who knows the language, who can read it, but language is only part of the issue because a work draws its appeal from other elements and can retain its original force even in a translation, as in the case of Things Fall Apart, which was translated into French as Le Monde s'effondre. This translation has made a tremendous impact in France and Francophone Africa, so it's not only the original language that determines the reception of a literary work. But I see the point you’re making. There are indeed English and American scholars who have specialized in the area of African Literature in English, which at one time was annexed as part of what was then called Commonwealth Literature. People then began to see this literature as part of the literature of the former British Empire transforming itself into the Commonwealth—having in common the use of English. But I don't think, myself, that that critical reception or even the scholarship by non-Africans had any kind of influence on the writer directly. I don't think so. Our writers were doing their own thing, without regard to their foreign critics. Let's look specifically at drama, for instance, Soyinka's play, The Road. You can't read The Road and think that you got anything substantial out of it as a text—that you got to the heart of the play. You have to see The Road to understand what Soyinka was trying to do. What I’m getting at is this: its impact on the audience, the immediate response of the audience mattered more to the playwright than whatever the critic has to say about it later on and many of our playwrights wrote with an awareness of audience. I'm thinking here of Ola Rotimi, who had tremendous success with his audiences. I saw a good number of his plays at Ife when I was there, for instance, Overamwen Nogbaisi, which was first produced at one of the annual Ife festivals. I'm not sure, myself, whether the written text of his plays are as interesting as the plays themselves on stage. My view then is there is a relationship between author and audience that is much more important, in the long run, than between audience and critic. The English critic Frank Kermode has this idea that fate of the writer is in the hands of the critic, but I would say, myself, that in this particular case of African Literature, that if a Nigerian audience--at the very minimum, a Nigerian academic/university audience--does not pick up a text, there's no amount of pushing from abroad that would make it work within the African context. I think we can safely say that.

Around the time of the initial development of modern Nigerian literature, how did Nigerian writers interact with writers from other parts of Africa? You’ve talked about the journal Black Orpheus, how it was attracting articles from other parts of Africa.

Primary texts... Yeah, translated and so on, but I just wanted to discuss this interaction...What other forum was there, where Nigerian writers interacted with writers from other parts of Africa?

Well, in the beginning, not much, I would say. The interaction came later, when international conferences began to be organized in order to bring African writers together. One major conference of this type took place in 1962, in Kampala. English speaking writers went over there and met English-speaking writers from other parts of Africa. I believe this was organized by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Foundations and international organizations usually sponsored those conferences and meetings. Before Kampala, there were the two historic Congresses organized by Presence Africaine: the first in Paris, in 1956, and the second in Rome, in 1959. Nigeria couldn’t very well be represented at these two conferences, but this changed after independence. Nigerian writers were to be seen everywhere, at conferences in Freetown, (that is Fourah Bay College, of the University of Sierra Leone), Dakar, Stockholm, Bordeaux, Bayreuth. One of the most memorable meetings was the conference on The “African Critic,” which as organized by Presence Africaine in Yaoundé, in 1974. This permitted Anglophone writers and scholars to meet and interact with their Francophone counterparts. Within Nigeria itself, we were also very active early on at Ife and later at Ibadan. The annual African Literature Conference at Ibadan sponsored by the English department became something of an institution from about the mid-seventies and to the mid-eighties: people came from all over the world to attend those conferences. Then Calabar took the idea, followed by Port Harcourt, then Benin City, so you had all those conferences.

The annual conference of the African Literature Association here in the States was also an important venue. For instance, all through the '80's, until I relocated here, I think I attended every single one of them. Every year, I always found some kind of way to come over here to the United States to attend the ALA. On a number of occasions, the ALA itself sent us air tickets, one of the reasons I’m attached to the association. That way, you had interaction and that interaction has increased tremendously since then, so that many of our writers have connections with other writers across the continent. I remember in 1992, the Harare conference on African literature organized by UNESCO brought together so many writers from all over Africa. Nadine Gordimer had just won the Nobel prize, and she attended that conference, along with other South Africans. So over the years, there have been these interactions, helped by various international organizations and the universities. I don’t want to sound partial, but Presence Africaine has been especially prominent in fostering these interactions.

Speaking especially of Presence Africaine reminds me of the controversy around the Negritude movement. Wole Soyinka’s remark about Negritude and Tigritude is well known. You are a major analyst yourself of some of these issues. I just want to ask you how the Nigerian writers responded to that.

You’re right, Soyinka’s phrase is well known, too well known perhaps, but it is true. It sums up the reaction among Nigerian writers and generally among Anglophone intellectuals. Eskia Mphahlele is typical; he wrote attacking Negritude in his book The African Image. The Anglophone position is: You don’t need to proclaim your negritude, you act it, you live it. But I think there’s lot of incomprehension involved in that response, a misunderstanding of the Negritude project, insufficient understanding, too, of the situation of the Francophone intellectual, under the colonial system. You cannot understand the concept of Negritude unless you take into account the demoralizing effect of French cultural policy. My point of view is that Negritude was inevitable. You know, if it didn't exist, as Voltaire said of God, it would have had to be invented. The tigritude remark by Wole Soyinka… but it seems he has come full circle in his latest book, The Burden of Memory: The Muse of Forgiveness, and is taking back much of what he said about Negritude in those early days. Perhaps he’s now an older and wiser person. At any rate, he appears to have acquired a greater sense of affinity with the francophone writers.

I happen to have been privileged to spend six years in France in constant touch with them. It is commonplace to say that Negritude was a cultural response to the French colonial policy of assimilation. Now, what I want to emphasize here is that the psychological stresses of that policy were lived by the Francophone African intellectuals, very intensely. What those people went through was nothing short of traumatic. I mean, it's quite clear, for instance, from Cheikh Hamidou Kane's novel Ambiguous Adventure, from the pathetic note that runs through that book. You need an understanding of those stresses in order to enter fully into the literature of Negritude. That sense of cultural discomfort is the starting point of Senghor's poetry, but he goes beyond this initial theme. His poetry develops as a construction, the elaboration of an alternative universe—cultural, spiritual, etc.—to that proposed by the French as a form of counter-discourse. By the time you get to his third volume “Nocturnes” to the sequence “The Epistles to the Princess,” you begin to see a new kind of writing, which has nothing to do with the themes with which he began: the psychological tension of the alienated individual, the divided consciousness, and so on. At this point, the poetry is rather now the construction of a new vision of the world, of a new mythology. This effort rests on an affirmation of his own world. He uses his relationship with his wife, a white woman, to emphasize this new dimension. Senghor is a poet of reconciliation, of unity. The message of his later poetry can be summed up like this: We have our world, you have your own world. Your world is noble. Our world is just as noble and there ought to be this relationship, this understanding between them.

I understood the Negritude position, which is not to say that I'm not critical. The most glaring problem with the Francophone African intellectual grouped around the concept of Negritude was their lack of political will to celebrate Negritude, blackness, African culture and so on, without going on to act on that concept and insist on political independence in the way Nkrumah was able to—that was a serious failing. My criticism of the Francophones has relevance even today with their total absorption with France, which makes it possible for France to continue to carry out what is quite clearly a neo-colonial policy, where all of those countries are really not merely spheres of influence but basically colonies of France, even though they are supposed to be independent. The Ministry of Colonies was transformed into the Ministry of Cooperation, but the change is merely cosmetic, in name only. France is permanent today in francophone Africa in a way England is no longer permanent in Anglophone Africa.

So I have a problem with that, because this has very serious consequences. ECOWAS has not taken off effectively in my view largely because the French have been putting obstacles in our way, creating right from the start rival organizations exclusively of francophone States, so as to retain control over them. They seem afraid that if we give effect to ECOWAS, their own economic interests will suffer. A shortsighted reaction, obviously, but I won’t go into that. Anyway, they have deliberately blocked the wider effort of regional cooperation because they control the economies of those countries. None of the francophone West African States is able to have an individual fiscal policy, because the common currency, the CFA, is controlled by the French. They were not even consulted when France decided some years ago to devalue the currency by as much as 50% and on top of all that, the French have been carrying out an immigration policy that discriminates against Africans, against the populations who fought for them in two world wars, but the French have no recognition of that.

What this means is that the Francophone African countries need to be de-assimilated, dis-alienated from their French thing. The initiative must come from Nigeria, but we must work at it. We can’t just assume they’ll come around out of a sentiment of solidarity. These countries observe a Nigeria that is in chaos, so it’s understandable if they ask themselves “why should we tie our destiny to an economy that is in disorder?” So it’s imperative for us to put our house in order, make it worthwhile for them to come with us rather than the French, but I must observe that they are beginning to realize that their relation with France is unprofitable.

That's a big question. I've had to wrestle with it, when writing the preface to the Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, because the preface has to do precisely with providing a working definition of African Literature. That is, making clear the criteria we adopted in commissioning articles in various areas: African Literature in Arabic, in French, in English, and so on. We also commissioned articles on literature in some of the African languages. The first part of the book is devoted to the oral literature. In fact, the whole book begins with a theoretical essay on African orality, by Liz Gunner, who is a specialist of Zulu Literature. A very perceptive essay. I specifically commissioned it from her as an opening essay to look at the question of orality, which is for me the foundation of African literature.

But to answer your question, here is a minimal definition, a working definition: African literature is literature produced by Africans, out of a distinctive African experience. I won’t press the issue of style, mode of writing and so on, what Roland Barthes called écriture. Now, there are at least three broad areas covered by this definition. You have to start with the oral literature and we don't need to go into the whole question of whether or not orality can sustain literature in the sense of imaginative expression. That's beyond discussion now. Then we have the literature in the African languages, the written literature in the various African languages. We tried to have the major ones represented in the Cambridge volume. We're both Yoruba-speaking, so we know, for instance, that there is a tradition of writing in the language going back to Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s translation of the Bible into Yoruba, using his native Oyo dialect of the language. We know that there is now a large body of written literature in Yoruba. Karin Barber was commissioned to write the chapter on this. She knows the language very well. She's one European who speaks Yoruba impeccably, with a correct mastering of the tones. She produced an excellent chapter. The two areas I’ve mentioned concern literature in African languages. Afrikaans is included in that category on the same footing as Swahili. We have a very fine chapter on Afrikaans. After that, we have the literature in the European languages introduced by the colonial experience: English, French, Portuguese, some in Spanish by the way, so this is a broad field. It's quite simply immense in terms of the field you're covering. No single scholar can possibly cover all that field, at least not adequately.

Where I know the language sufficiently, I've tried to do some work. In the case of Yoruba (because I grew up during my early education with the novels of Fagunwa) I tried to examine the flow of inspiration that connects him with Tutuola and Soyinka, but I've not written on any other Yoruba writer because I have not studied them at any kind of length or depth. My work has focused rather on the literature in English and French. Mind you, the Francophone side includes a Caribbean component. I’ve long wanted to do something with Lusophone literature, especially since Roger Bastide, my old professor at the Sorbonne, tried to interest me in Afro-Brazilian poetry. I began to learn Portuguese on my own, but I’ve not had time to master it, to acquire a reading knowledge.

But there’s not only the imaginative literature to consider, you also have to think of the intellectual background to the literature, the climate of ideas in which it is produced, ideas formulated specifically at a conceptual level. That forms part of the literary history as well. History itself is a dimension of the literature. You can readily grasp Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, but the wider resonances of those texts will be revealed to you when you’re aware of the profound process of evolution in Igbo society that Dike documents in his classic work, Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta. I think every African should read that book. It’s a magnificent book, a model of historical writing.

You can see then that African literature taken as a whole, in the scholarly perspective I’m trying to outline, is a demanding field. I don't think anyone needs to make any kind of apology about being a specialist in African Literature, because you're doing as much work there as you would be doing in other fields. This leads me to another point that needs to be stressed, and that is, you cannot even do African Literature in any of the European languages without a fairly close acquaintance with Western Literature. If you're doing African Literature in English, all the whole network of intertextuality this involves means that you must be familiar with the great texts: Shakespeare, Donne, The Romantics, Dickens, right up to the moderns Eliot and Yeats. You cannot consider Wole Soyinka’s work, despite it’s being steeped in African, Yoruba mythology and so on, you cannot consider Wole Soyinka in isolation from the corpus of British drama. It certainly helps to read A Dance of the Forest in relation to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which can be taken as its fundamental reference in formal terms that is, its “intertext,” in the current jargon.

Well, doing African Literature is strenuous business, not by any means a soft option. I say this because there still exists a prejudice about African literature, beginning with the very idea that there is no such thing, at any rate, nothing of significance, that it’s at best a minor literature. I’m taking this term of course in its usual pejorative sense, and not as a generic category, like Deleuze. This reminds one of the professor at Cambridge University who was asking Skip Gates, "What is African Literature?” Fortunately for the reputation of Cambridge, there are specialists there who are doing very serious work in African Literature, specifically Tim Cribb, at Churchill College and Ato Quayson at Pembroke.

This brings me to another area that we need to turn to--I’m talking of geographical area--that is South Africa, where the study of African Literature is only beginning. I’m thinking here of the University of Natal in Durban and Pietermaritzburg where some important work is being done, but a major university like Witwatersrand is not yet particularly interested in African Literature. Their English or Literature syllabus barely makes room for the literature of the continent in which they are located! But Professor David Attwell has just been appointed there, so there’s hope that we’ll see some development. The University of South Africa at Pretoria (UNISA, that is, not to be confused with the University of Pretoria), UNISA has always been very strong in the Literature in the African Languages--Sotho, Zulu, Swati, and the rest of them--but we hope now that they will also teach African Literature in the European languages, in the English and French departments and so on. As far as I can see, the English department at UNISA is totally oriented towards an ideal construct of the West. They are quite happy in that department to be a backwater of western culture . . .

But elsewhere, the field has developed tremendously and continues to develop . . . but we know that it's now being absorbed--this is a problem we might have to look at--it's now being absorbed by what is called postcolonial studies, which raises a whole set of problems.

We’ll come to that issue later, but I want us to talk now about the Nobel Prize won by Soyinka in 1986. That seems to be a major development. And then, of course, there are now other winners of that prize. And how did that really help the scholarship on African Literature Scholarship?

I don’t know, perhaps it did help indirectly, perhaps because Soyinka’s Nobel prize, and later on Gordimer and Mahfouz, helped to focus attention on Africa as an area of literary culture. Well, we always have this problem as Africans that we have to prove ourselves, justify ourselves and so on, so it was gratifying to us that Soyinka has won the Nobel prize. But at the same time, there was a debate in Nigeria about whether it was truly an occasion for rejoicing. The debate was sparked off by an article by Chinwezu who said the Nobel Prize had no importance for us and I came out to say, what if a Nigerian athlete had won a gold medal in some major event at the Olympics or our national football team had won the World Cup? Even so-called developed nations take pride in getting that kind of international attention, you know. So I still cling to the idea that the Nobel Prize was very important, was a very good thing—it brought us recognition, perhaps even a form of validation. We won't get that kind of recognition, much less respect, from organizing beauty queen contests.

But I don’t want to leave the matter just at that. I'm not saying we should just excel at Literature and that's enough. No! I think we should also excel in other things that matter. And first of all, we should have orderly societies. Stable political regimes. Development in the sense in which we are improving the standard of living for our people. We become a modern nation. We're going to be respected more for that. Then, the cultural thing will fit in as icing on the cake, but what is happening is this strange thing: that we have talented writers from that chaotic place called Nigeria, which produces a Nobel Prize winner but risks disintegrating. You begin to ask yourself, what's the point? There’s another dimension to the question that has to do with the implications for the Diaspora, because the fate of the black people in the West depends on what happens in Africa. We have an immense responsibility here. I mean quite simply this: that when we've sorted ourselves out, put our house in order over there, black people will be treated better here in America. I'm putting it simply and crudely, but when you have to go through all this problem of racism in America, you wonder whether anything can be simple or crude. True, a lot of progress has been made and the institutional thing has been dismantled, but there are issues of racism that we who are black people here have to confront on a daily basis. The shooting of Diallo is a grim reminder that racism is not over, as Dinesh d’Souza and his friends would like us to believe.

The increasing immigration of Africans into America means that we have more and more first hand experience of what the African-Americans are going through, what it means to be black, a minority, in American society. As more and more Africans settle here, a new awareness of the legacy of racism will develop. We have children who are Americans and who are going to live here, who are black and have to face these problems. I tell myself the only way they are going to be comfortable here is when we've sorted things out in Africa, so that they are respected in the way Japanese people are now respected and the way in which Chinese people are being respected more and more. It’s become apparent that the yardstick is not culture. Everybody has culture, but developed economies, industrial capacity. On that score, we’re not measuring up. It’s not enough to have Nobel Prize winners, poets, musicians, athletes, and exceptional individuals like that. We must make it collectively. This is why the whole political situation in Nigeria causes me so much distress--the implications are so far-reaching, because it’s an obstacle, it’s blocking our potential.

But let me make myself clear. This has nothing to do with a sense of shame or inferiority. That's not the point. We know the Europeans are more than capable of barbarity, so they're no better than us from that point of view. I read nothing but European history at school and I can tell you, it’s one long catalogue of wars and desolation. Besides, my childhood was spent under the shadow of the Second World War. Even on the question of democracy and political organization, Europeans are hardly qualified to give us lessons either. The colonial system was authoritarian in essence. It was a denial of freedom, a glaring example of undemocratic rule and empire often meant the extermination of whole peoples. The internal example is hardly better. Nazism and Fascism are historical events within living memory, with all the human misery they caused. Up until the sixties, there were two powerful dictatorships in western Europe—in Spain and Portugal—and the whole of eastern Europe practically from the Elbe to the Urals was under totalitarian rule behind what Churchill called “The Iron Curtain.” It’s only recently that the system was dismantled. European leaders forget this history today when they strike attitudes and try to give us moral lessons about governance. That’s why I find all those programs in American universities about African governance so distasteful.

No, my concern is not to conform to prescriptions from the West, to a certain conception of us as good pupils, but for us to understand our problems and to solve them in our own interest. I want to see functional societies emerge in Africa. I want to see a Nigeria that is functioning, which it is not. Visibly, it is not--the distress, the deprivation back home, the misrule, the corruption: all this is only too glaring. We desperately need to create a better society. Beyond this, the point is that we need to take our place, an honorable place, in the modern world. Then we, as Nigerians, as Africans, will be strong enough to control our destinies. Then black people in America will be respected, accepted fully as part of American democracy, the American nation. All of that is tied together.

I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you. We shall come back to the issue of scholarship in the Diaspora because I really want us to talk about the African literary scholarship in the Diaspora--the question of postcolonial studies and cultural studies. But let's continue on this political issue a little bit and then we'll come back. You have all sorts of African leadership and for many years. . . you cited the example of Chinua Achebe and his novel A Man of the People, where he was virtually warning Africans and saying, “If you do not have good government, these are the risks.” Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that African countries have learned their lessons . . . Well, there have been some positive developments, some more stability on the continent. And in South Africa, apartheid has ended. Nigeria is no longer under military regime. Ghana is no longer under military regime. Kenya’s Moi has finally left.

Let’s turn first to Zimbabwe. Now, in all this talk of Zimbabwe, one thing that is lost sight of is the inequity of the economic situation there, where whites, who are a tiny minority, control practically all the land, the best part, all the productive activity. That has to be kept in mind. However, I think that the way Mugabe has gone about this thing is not merely immoral, but is, in fact, impractical. Immoral in the sense that he is resorting to state thuggery, to a naked display of power. It’s the last thing a legitimate government ought to do, because then you you’re setting a bad example, you undermine your own government. When you beat up political opponents, you ignore court orders, suppress free speech, send people in to seize farms by force-- when as a government you do all kinds of terrible things, I think this is wrong—pure and simple. This is supposed to be a civilian government, but what you have in Zimbabwe today is a dictatorship. Having gone through military dictatorships in Nigeria, I’m wary about that. Secondly, Mugabe is impractical because his methods are hurting his own people. To dismantle the economy all of a sudden, in one fell swoop, all that is bound to lead to chaos. From the reports we have, this is what is happening today in Zimbabwe. I visited Harare a number of times as an external examiner at the university, then for the conference in 1992. It was a beautiful place then, but I hear that it’s all gone down. But on reflection, perhaps it’s really no worse than Lagos.

As you now, I offered some reflections on the African situation in my keynote address at the conference you organized at Alberta in 1998--it’s now taken the form of a paper I’ve entitled “The Political Kingdom: Toward Reconstruction in Africa.” I won’t summarize the paper, I just want to restate the main thesis: that we need urgently to update our societies. That’s not as simple as it sounds, because it implies that we need to adopt modern concepts of political organization, of social processes, of economic production. This bears emphasis, especially the issue of democracy, because we’re still so far from the ideal. We don’t as yet have democratic societies, where people have certain freedoms, where people have certain rights, where you have a civil society and so on. Above all, the rule of law. It has sometimes been argued that what you need for development is a dictatorship. People point to Syngman Rhee and say that’s what he did in South Korea and look where South Korea is now. People point to Franco in Spain and say that Franco, conservative as he was, modernized Spain, which was a backward country before he came to power. I don’t buy that.

France is for me a strong counter example. When I was a student in France, one of the things that impressed me most was the modernization effort that took place in the sixties, during the six years that I spent in France. I observed the total dedication of the governing classes to bringing their country up to date. De Gaulle was a conservative, but he understood that France had to modernize. It was an obsession with him. The state industries were reorganized: the electrical system was upgraded with investments floated publicly, the gas system was revamped, the train network was expanded. Today, they have the best public transportation system in the world, and when you look at other sectors, at France as a whole, you have to admit that France is a successful economy, so I don’t buy the argument that dictatorship is necessary for development, for modernization.

Let me add to that I have been going into England since 1960, more than fourty years in and out. The England I saw in 1960 was a pretty dismal place really, a different thing from the England that one sees today. The difference in London is simply amazing, London gleaming with prosperity, as I could see for myself when I took a walk some years ago from Hyde Park to Oxford Street and into Tottenham Court Road... Another example is Ireland, which I visited in 1999, visibly undergoing rapid transformation. I can well imagine that people will be definitely more content in those societies, with a decent level of material living. It is fashionable to denounce the consumer society, to decry its deadening effect on the soul. You can have people deliberately opting to be poor for religious or philosophical reasons. That is their personal choice and they can remain happy, but you cannot have a whole population that is deprived, maintained in abject poverty, that lives in physical agony, and think that this is good for their souls. That’s nonsense. An ugly environment like we have in many African cities can harden the heart, and it is not an exaggeration to say that people living in the urban areas in Africa are living lives hardly better than animals. Their conditions are harsh and terrible—go to Lagos and you’ll see what I mean. This is what writers like Meja Mwangi of Kenya and Festus Iyayi and Ben Okri of Nigeria have been depicting in their fiction and even Nkem Nwankwo dwells on these conditions in his satiric novel My Mercedes is Bigger Than Yours.

Because our level of tolerance is so incredibly high, so that we put up with irresponsible leaders. Our experience shows that even in the best of cases, authoritarian rule is no guarantee of development. When you depend on the goodwill and the honesty of one man, of a dictator, that’s too much of a risk for a whole country to take. Why not foster a general commitment to development through a system that does not depend on the personal caprice of an Eyadema, a Mobutu or a Babangida, but rather on a collective will? This is the problem in Africa: to develop democratic institutions that transcend personalities, that are based on consent of the ruled. The late Claude Aké argued in his last book published posthumously that economic development in Africa has been hindered by the lack democratic institutions, and I agree with his analysis. One might even say that once we do establish such institutions, everything else will follow: Nkrumah’s political kingdom reinterpreted, hence my title. But we must also beware of what has been called “illiberal democracy.” It’s a term coined by Fareed Zakaria, it means you can have all the institutions of democracy, but yet the content is not even liberal.

It all comes down ultimately to our capacity for building viable and enduring institutions. On this point, let me say something about the universities, because one of the most serious problems we have in Africa is the collapse of the universities. There is a crisis of higher education everywhere, but what we have in Africa is quite different from that in America or Europe. Here in America, the crisis has to do with the invention of the corporate university, but I think Americans are going to come back and understand that universities cannot be corporations, that they embody certain moral and intellectual values that go beyond money making. It is this old fashioned ideal that the universities in Africa must represent. This is one of the reasons why the collapse of the universities is such a sad thing. I think we have a duty to revitalize the universities and to give them a role as powerhouses of ideas. Make them also centers of learning, of excellence, in terms of research, even pure research. When Crick and Watson were unraveling the structure of DNA, they did the work as pure research. They didn’t think of it as applied or anything likely to yield immediate returns, but look at the implications today, the whole genetic revolution.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I can see what you’re trying to get at, and it’s so sad that as we’re here right now. Nigerian universities are virtually non-existent. I mean, the system is virtually non-existent. Most of the faculty members and the non-academic members of the universities are actually on strike. Really very sad.

It’s not unusual for the universities in Nigeria to be closed for months on end and this has been going on for years now. Think of the economic consequences for the country, think of the impact on the poor students who can’t take their degrees within the standard four years, who take six, sometimes seven years to complete their studies, and this under the most discouraging conditions.

It’s very sad. Very sad. But perhaps there’s hope. I’m thinking of The African Renaissance Project, which has been championed by Mbeki and is now an all-African thing. In fact, the Organization of African Unity itself has now metamorphosed into what is now called the African Union, and they’re talking about having a parliament. The African Parliament, where they will be able to take a common stand on issues. The African Union has launched this program called NEPAD, in which they want to emphasize good governance, economic unification based on common projects. We’ve heard recently that Nigeria is examining the possibility of generating electricity from the Congo as part of all of these programs.

It was proposed long ago under the Belgian administration: to develop electricity from the Congo and to carry it all the way into West Africa. It’s an old scheme. It was abandoned when the Volta dam was built and Ghana began to supply electricity to neighboring countries. Nigeria, too, built the Kainji dam for internal supply, but we’ve discovered that the supply from these two sources is not sufficient, so I’m glad that the AU has gone back to the old project.

Well, let’s agree there’s cause for a whole new optimism in Africa today about the African Renaissance and all the changes taking place, some of them profound. A good sign of all these changes is the elections in Kenya, where the Kenyans were able to change their regime, as you rightly pointed out. Another good sign is that Uganda has withdrawn from Congo and so on. But I want to sound a note of caution: the problems are still immense. You only have to look at Nigeria and the chaos in the Delta. The Delta risks tearing Nigeria apart, so a cautious optimism is in order, but the optimism is justified by a few positive cases here and there. One of the countries that is not even being looked at when you are talking about those developments in Africa is the Benin Republic. You remember they inaugurated that business of the national conference. They had a wonderful transition from military to civilian, where Soglo became president, but he was later voted out after his first term, and Kerekou came back as civilian leader. A surprising turn of events, all without violence, and so far Benin has been quite calm. This happens to be a country that I know very well. Nothing spectacular about it, but undergoing a quiet development, expanding the infrastructure in particular. They are rebuilding their roads; they are extending electricity, water, telephone, etc. That is a small country that is functioning better than Nigeria. Perhaps Benin Republic can be an example of how to proceed, of an African country that is, in a very modest way, making steady progress. You don’t need massive colossal projects to develop. You can do it in small ways. Suppose Obasanjo decided, “Okay, I have four years and I want to achieve something in those four years. Let me give Nigeria an electrical network that works.” That would be a major achievement, don’t you think, given what we know of the deplorable state of the electricity supply in Nigeria. How do you enter the computer age without electricity? How do you operate modern machines? I’m reminded of Lenin’s famous slogan about electricity and managers as essential to his new economic policy in the young soviet republic.

All this to make a point that Biodun Jeyifo has developed at length in a brilliant paper he presented two years ago at a conference in Lagos on globalization: that Africa has not only been simply marginalized, but effectively shut out of the modern economy and more tragic still, out of the modern system of knowledge production. But there is a glimmer of hope in South Africa, which has the potential to develop into a major industrial country. They have an excellent infrastructure inherited from the apartheid regime to build on. The thing about South Africa that is gratifying is that they have understood one thing and that is that they must transform that economy from being a primary economy, which depends on digging gold and diamonds into an industrial economy that is productive, and now they have oil to finance that transformation. This is also what Nigeria should be doing. We can’t go on just producing and exporting oil. It’s a wasting asset, and we’re not even reinvesting the earnings from oil in productive ventures.

The trouble with Nigeria, as Achebe said years ago, is the leadership. I’m not even talking about Obasanjo. I am talking about those wretched politicians in the Senate, in the House of Representatives, who are only concerned about what they can get out of the country. The first thing they did as a civilian regime was to vote themselves large salaries and allowances. Now they’re asking for severance pay, three years of their annual salary, when they are defeated at the elections so that they go quietly. We cannot pay teachers. The hospitals are in a terrible condition. The infrastructures are inadequate or broken down, yet the politicians continue to loot the country. We have engaged on the same downward path in Nigeria as Haiti over the past 200 years. Jean Metellus--he is one of Haiti’s most prominent writers--Metellus has called his country “a pathetic nation.” Haiti is ruined, not merely in terms of its political institutions, but physically: it is becoming a desert. The vegetation has been cleared. They have cut down the trees, and the place is drying up. All as a direct consequence of the country’s terrible political history. The parallel between Nigeria and Haiti prompts the question: what use is cultural achievement if the country itself is in such a desperate situation?

Absolutely, and that is what I really want to say because African writers have really been concerned for a long time about mobilizing Africans for development. African writers have even participated as politicians. Sedar Senghor was president of Senegal. Wole Soyinka has always been very critical of military and civilian regimes. So what role do you think African writers should play today?

One of the interesting developments in African has been the way the role of the writer has changed. Before independence, our writers were nationalists, committed to independence. Writers and political leaders saw eye to eye. Sometimes even, the writer was a politician, as in the case of Senghor you’ve mentioned. Now in the post independence period, there is a rift. The writer is now in opposition to the political leadership. The best example of course is that of Ngugi and the problems he had with Moi, which forced him to go into exile.

What role should African writers play? Literature cannot promote development directly, not in the crude programmatic kind of way that socialist realism suggests. What it can do, however, is to mold consciousness, and that is a major function of literature. I often cite the example of the social novels in England in the 19^th century. They had a tremendous impact in helping to inspire the social legislation that changed the face of England. I mean the novels of writers like Charles Dickens and Mary Barton. They revealed the level of social distress in England, which could then be remedied later on by legislation. And it’s been said the abolition of slavery was helped by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel was influential. Literature can play the same role in Africa. Not utilitarian or programmatic, but moral, something to do with creating the frame of mind that enables a society to see itself and take the kinds of measures that are necessary for improvement.

African writers have been addressing social issues in the post-independence era. Literature can have a reforming function, which is why I cited the examples of the social novels in England and the social legislation that they inspired. It is unthinkable today that you can have in England a situation like Blake’s chimney sweepers or another Oliver Twist. The American philosopher Richard Rorty is surely right to insist that the fundamental questions of social and political life have been taken care of in western democracies. Which is not to say that those societies don’t have problems, but these are residual, not as fundamental as those we still have to confront in Africa, even at the basic level of material living. These are political issues that determine the conditions of existence for all of us. They are directly relevant to any discussion, any consideration of African literature. Literature is a form of art, but it need not necessarily retreat from life. African literature speaks directly to experience; it’s not about the human condition in a general way, undifferentiated, but concrete. It confronts those problems that we face in the real world in an imaginative register. As critics and scholars, we must remind ourselves that social commitment is not incompatible with aesthetic value. Trotsky made the point convincingly long ago, in his landmark text, Literature and Revolution.

What about writing in African languages? Ngugi has switched from English to Gikuyu and Swahili and has argued that African writers should employ their indigenous languages for their work. He seems to be on a campaign about this issue; he co-organized the big conference held in Eritrea in 2000 on the question of literature in African languages. Do you agree with his arguments for abandoning the European languages for African ones, at least when it comes to literature?

You raise a number of issues there. That fundamental one is the relationship of the African writer to the local audience. How does the writer reach this audience if he or she writes in a language foreign to them? Because few Africans can read English or French or Portuguese. That is what Ngugi means when he advocates the use of African languages for our literature. He is thinking primarily of the revolutionary potential of literature and the urgency of getting the message across, making it accessible in the language of the people. I think one can concede the point, but the problem is more complicated than it seems at first. The assumption that literature in African languages is necessarily progressive is false. You can have a literature that is conservative, obscurantist in our languages, in any language. There are great and beautiful works that can have a harmful effect. I often wonder how the French epic Song of Roland with its constant reference to the Saracen as a danger, as the enemy, how this classic work conditions today a certain hostile attitude to the Arab in the millions of French schoolchildren who have to read it as part of their education—an attitude they retain later on in life.

I totally agree with you, but let’s move on now to another issue: postcolonial theory. African scholars are now participating in developing postcolonial theory, but one of the criticisms of the theory is that most of those engaged in it do not really share the experience of the natives, the experience that the primary literature is about. They live in the First World and are theorizing about the Third World natives. So what do you see happening to African literary scholarship and the whole development of postcolonial theory?

The position that was being canvassed at one time was that the raw material, literature, culture generally, would be produced in Africa, but the theory would be produced outside Africa, in the West. The same unequal relationship as in the economic sphere where the raw material goes out and is transformed into the finished product. As far as literary studies are concerned, that is not the case—that was never the case. It was not as if you had literature being produced by Africans and then you had the cadre of western critical workers, non-Africans doing the thinking for us. We did quite a lot of critical and theoretical work in the African universities as we began to introduce courses in African literature. One of the major theories that emerged in the early period of the study of African literature was the concept of orality or oracy or orature by analogy with literature. Those were terms and ideas that were emerging out of the study of African literature. Oracy was as a major theoretical construct, and East Africans were particularly active in developing it, even as Ngugi was also involved at Nairobi in redefining the structure of the English department. Gradually, the various departments of English were transformed into departments of literature. Let me just say in passing that while he was writing about it we were quietly carrying out the same reforms in Nigeria. We didn’t write about that. When I became chair of Modern Languages at Ibadan, the first thing I did was to revamp the curriculum in French to integrate francophone African and Caribbean literature. That department has since been renamed—it is now called Department of European Languages, more appropriate in our context. These reforms came about because we had to reexamine the field in the light of our own situation. For example, the late Mohamadou Kane—he was the most prominent literary scholar in francophone Africa up to his death in 1992—Kane published an essay in the seventies that was a reinterpretation of the notion of literary history as it applies to African literature, and he’s been followed more recently by another francophone critic Georges Ngal, in a book that reflects on the succession of generations in African literature. So we’ve been playing our own part in shaping the scholarship.

However, there was a time when in the study of African literature outside of Africa, some concepts [were] being brought forward as a way of getting a handle on it. First, it was identified with Commonwealth literature. A journal was even created, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, to cater for this and it is true that nearly all the early critics of African literature were Europeans: people like Gerald Moore, John Povey, David Cook, Ulli Beier. The Americans came later, but we were also involved right from the beginning. There were lots of us Africans who were writing about African literature, so that sort of neat division of labor suggested by later theorists, that was never the case. What we are now seeing is another effort to create a global label, so that Commonwealth Literature has now been replaced by postcolonial studies.

Let us note first of all that postcolonial studies has developed out of various other movements. It leans heavily on theories developed in other contexts, such as postmodernism and Marxism, subaltern studies, and so on. It grew out of the obsession with theory that swept through Literature departments. I’m reminded here of a young African scholar I met at a party, a young woman who has just been appointed assistant professor at a prestigious American university. When I asked her what her specialty was, she replied “theory,” but when I then asked her, “theory of what?” She had no answer.

The problem with postcolonial studies is that it does not know what it is. The theoretical underpinnings are vague--and I say this with apologies to my good friend Ato Quayson. Even the textual representation of postcolonial studies is very uncertain. To put Africans together with Canadians and Australians in the same postcolonial bag seems to me very odd. I have, therefore, preferred to just stick with the label African literature: with that, despite the problems of definition we discussed earlier on, you basically know where you are, what you are talking about. This leads me to another problem I have with postcolonial studies today, because at the moment its focus is Southwest Asia, it has shifted attention to Indian literature. African literature more or less plays second fiddle to this other field within the general area of postcolonial studies, but my strongest objection is that it forces us to define ourselves exclusively in terms of the colonial experience and our relation with the west. It is easier for me to say that this literature is African literature, and that some of it deals with the colonial experience or the post-independence experience and other areas deal with an experience that has nothing to do with the colonial, for example, the oral literature, the folk tales and the poetry. But if you call the literature postcolonial, you have only one broad historical perspective, which has to do with that one particular relationship and that is something I feel we should discard. There is also the problem of the language in which postcolonial studies is carried on. All the jargon. That language has crept into the writing of our younger people, and when you read their writings you are reading pages and pages and you are unsure of what they are saying, so you have this Homi Bhabha kind of language that is now spreading all over the place. Homi Bhabha is saying something interesting in that language, which is more than can be said of his imitators. You get the impression that the language does the thinking for them. By the way I know Homi Bhabha very well. I’m looking forward to being his colleague at Harvard. He’s extremely engaging when he speaks, absolutely powerful, but I don’t know why he writes like that. It is the same with his compatriot Spivak. Terry Eagleton had cause to complain about her style in his review of her last book.

Well, it could be deliberate. I remember someone said to me that you could not discuss theory in a layman’s language. It has to be a language itself that is difficult to penetrate, and I said, “Well, why must it be so?”

Yes, why indeed? Much of that enigmatic style comes from the Germans, especially Hegel. Bertrand Russell called him a pompous fool. The style is now associated largely with the German thinkers of the Frankfurt school, people like Adorno, Habermas and others—all of them have been writing in a particular way. It sometimes gives a bloated feeling to their work. I was reading Habermas, his Legitimation Crisis. He spends something like fifty pages of a slim volume on the notion of crisis. I mean, I agree that you must begin by defining a term, but you can’t go on for fifty pages on the notion of crisis before you begin to get on with the main subject. Take his other book, Communicstive Action. He begins with the notion of rationality and goes on for seventy pages and more, and yet, as far as I can see, the problem is not even resolved, because he has this narrow concept of rationality.

There are genuine cases where the ideas are difficult and cannot be conveyed in simpler language. You cannot say, for instance, that Kant could have written in a style that is more accessible, but there was a time when philosophers wrote in a style that people could easily read. I mean, you can read Plato. You can read Aristotle. And Aristotle can be quite difficult, especially in the more technical aspects. Even when you’re reading a straightforward text like the Nicomachean Ethics, you have to be very attentive, on your toes, but it’s not written in any kind of special language. My view anyway is that there is virtue in writing clearly.

I totally agree with you, but let’s return to the issue of African writers in exile, writers like Soyinka and Ngugi who were forced at one time or another into exile. I remember Soyinka saying that he does not see himself as a writer in exile, because his mind is not in exile, his mind is at home. He may be physically there, but spiritually, he’s back home. Is this enough?

Any writer in exile physically loses touch with the home base, and as the years go by, you have a less vivid sense of what life is like in the country, in your community of origin. It was therefore not enough for Soyinka to say, “I may be physically in exile, but spiritually, I’m back home.” It has been essential for him to return home, to maintain a physical connection with home, so he travels back and forth. It seems like the airplane was invented for him because he needs it for that connection.

Right. All his recent work shows that he’s very much in touch with day-to-day events at home. Now, I think of someone like Biyi Bandele. I think of someone like Ben Okri, just to restrict ourselves to Nigeria, and they write about experience in Europe, in England. Much of it is black experience indeed, but I have a sense also that their work continues to be strongly related to Nigeria. Ben Okri began by writing about Nigeria and his great novel . . .

Yes, The Famished Road, which won the Booker Prize: it’s set in Lagos. Reading the book, you get a raw sense of what life is like there. Now, I begin to worry that that vitality which came from his immediate connection with home, which you feel in the short stories of Incidents at the Shrine, especially the powerful story about the civil war in Stars of the New Curfew’s ``Worlds That Flourish'', that he may lose that vitality, because we hear he’s now saying that he’s not an African writer, he’s not a Nigerian writer. Perhaps it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to claim him if he doesn’t want to be one, but we know he couldn’t have written The Famished Road without being steeped in the Nigerian experience. As you know, the title itself comes from a Soyinka poem and suggests the source of his inspiration—all the interconnections with Fagunwa and Tutuola leading up to Soyinka that I examined in “Tradition and the Yoruba Writer.” Even though he is Urhobo, he has connected with that tradition. But his present stance raises a problem, in an acute way, I think, and that is the problem of the writer in exile. What kind of material, what kind of substance are you going to thrive on if you’ve cut yourself off from your native environment? From the very source of your inspiration? That’s the problem.

Are they going to create a new type of writing that cannot be defined as African writing or African Literature, but at the same time may not be described as British or American or Canadian writing? What does one call it?

Maybe there’s a sense in which a writer need not be firmly rooted. A certain kind of literature exists that is international. One good example, I would say would be the work of Conrad. Conrad never really wrote about Poland, except perhaps allusively in Under Western Eyes. He wrote about terrorists in England: The Secret Agent. His great novel, his masterpiece really, Nostromo is set in Latin America. Heart of Darkness is set in the Congo, but we mustn’t forget that his characters are Europeans. The irony of his novella is that the heart of darkness is Kurtz. Also, it has been remarked that Conrad was very much a Polish writer in terms of his outlook on the world, of his tragic sense of life, but I don’t see an African writer just writing vague, international stuff and eliciting any kind of interest. I don’t see it happening, but I may be wrong. I’m thinking now of The Remains of the Day by Ishiguro. He is of Japanese origin, but wrote about life among the ruling classes in England, about a butler saddled with a false consciousness. Quite convincingly, too, otherwise he would not have landed the Booker Prize, so there are all kinds of possibilities. The great thing about art, literature, and so on is that you cannot make rules for it. I don’t want to sound like a superstitious worshipper of genius, but in fact, there are great writers, and there is something about them that will transcend the conditions, and so you can have a Conrad who can write about revolutionaries in Latin America and get away with it.

Thank you very much. We’re in a new century now, the twenty first century, and I’ve been thinking, with all the transformations on the world scene in recent years what is going to happen to Africana scholarship? People have been predicting that with the developments in Eastern Europe, all the events in the former Soviet Union, African Studies would no longer be as important as it used to be, and that especially in America, people would focus on East European or Russian Studies, but the developments at Harvard that we’ve discussed may be evidence that this may not be the case. If so, how do you see the role of the African Literature Association (ALA), the African Studies Association (ASA) in the future of African Studies, generally speaking?

Broadly speaking, there are now two categories of scholars in African Studies: Africans and non-Africans. Let’s look at that first before thinking about the future of the two associations. The African Literature Association and the African Studies Association—most of the people in those associations, most of our American colleagues, both white and black, African American that is, most of them happen to be people who have been to Africa at one point or another, through the Peace Corps or Fulbright, have taken an interest in Africa and have retained a certain connection to Africa. There are these two categories, which means we Africans are now on an equal footing with our western colleagues. This hasn’t always been so. In the past, we used to be the native informants. There was the research person out here—the European or American, who did the fieldwork and used us as native informants. The attitude created by that arrangement prevailed until quite recently. Let me cite an example. I was present many years ago at a seminar given by Professor Capo from the Benin Republic in the Linguistics Department here at Ohio State. An extremely informative seminar on an aspect of historical linguistics of the “gbe” group of languages stretching from Gun in Badagry in Nigeria, to Ewe in Ghana. At the end of it, he was asked who were his informants. Now, Capo is a native speaker of Fon, which is central to the continuum he was describing. Moreover, he speaks fluent Yoruba, which has had a tremendous influence on the languages in question. (By the way, his last name is a shortened form of Akapo ifa, the guardian of the paraphernalia used in Ifa divination), so the question was ridiculous. Another example, more interesting, on this subject of native informants. A few years ago, one of our American colleagues at Indiana University wrote to an African scholar here at Ohio State University to invite him to collaborate in a research project, but as a native informant. I read his letter, he was specific about that in his letter, even though he knew my African colleague here had a PhD. That was sometime in 1988 or 1989. I don’t see any western Africanist making that mistake in the year 2003, because as I pointed out with the literature, we Africans are contributing to changing attitudes about African realities, so they don’t pontificate like they used to do anymore.

Still there are problems, and to illustrate, let me recount another incident that brought home to me the status of African Studies, the vision people entertain in this academic environment. Some years ago, I applied for the position of Chair of African Studies at a prominent American university and had to meet with a group of graduate students as part of the interview process. All the students were white, and this is significant, because the first question I was asked was: how do you think you’re qualified as a literary critic to chair an African Studies Center? It became apparent to me that in the mind of the student who asked that question, African Studies is firmly associated with Anthropology. It is about the Other, preferably the primitive other. It is at best an antiquarian discipline, concerned with people out there in another remote world, nothing to do with the living experience that literature explores.

Can we say that this was an isolated case, that the attitude displayed by that student is not typical, that it’s no longer typical of the western scholar’s approach to Africa? I’m not so sure, because even where their viewpoint is sympathetic, it is still quite often the viewpoint from outside. Let me use the field of music, where the methods that have been established in the discipline continue to dominate. You have to study African music as ethno-musicology, not as musicology. The term “musicology” is reserved for Western music. Which means that African music is a separate category, something different, but when you’re listening to the music of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, are you listening to ethnomusic? There is, in fact, a hierarchy implied. When they write, even affectionately, about our own realities and then use that kind of terminology, when you adopt the ethnographic perspective, there’s always a hierarchy implied. A major scholar of African music—Kofi Agawu at Princeton—is now trying to do away with the distinction of musicology as applied to Western music and ethnomusicology as applied to music from other parts of the world and this from a theoretical point of view. It just happens to be that case, however, that attitudes are entrenched, so that sometimes even our own colleagues in literature adopt that method. This was the theoretical perspective of Christopher Miller’s book Theories of Africans. The whole import of that book, essentially, is that the only way to understand African Literature is through an ethnological approach. He was taken aback, even offended—outraged is an even a better word—by the negative reaction he provoked, but he ought to have known better, that you don’t propound a theory about autonomous moral agents and expect them not to react. Even my good friend Lindfors fell into that trap. Bernth Lindfors has been to Africa many times and has been in the field a long time. His 1999 edited book on African theatre has the subtitle: Studies in ethnological show business, but why study African drama, why write about it as ethnology? That’s the difference between him and Biodun Jeyifo, who has written about the traveling theater in its social dimensions, but not as ethnology, that’s unthinkable for him. We definitely need to bring home to our American and European colleagues that there are certain approaches to African subjects that will not do.

You will recall that many years ago, there was a huge rumpus at one of the ASA conferences in Canada (Montreal), a revolt by black scholars who said that the thing was dominated, too much dominated by whites. This was in October 1969, at the height of the civil rights movement. Not much has changed it seems. In 1989, I took students in the Black Studies department at Ohio State to the ASA meeting in Atlanta. We drove all the way from here in a mini-bus, sharing the driving, and when we came back to discuss the conference, students were telling me: you said it’s an African Studies Association, but the place was filled with white scholars. This, from black students, as you can well imagine. How does one respond to that? I notice, of course, that there are more and more black scholars, more and more African scholars now in the ASA, but it is still dominated by white scholars. There is no question at all about it. Now, this is where the whole question of attitudes and perspectives come in. African Studies must have a broad, catholic perspective. It must not be seen as a field concerned with or undergirded by any kind of ethnological theory where African Studies is in a category by itself isolated from other areas of human experience. We heard recently, in 2002, at a conference in Wellesley College, from no less a scholar than Robert Young, who was telling us that postcolonial studies, postcolonial theory was devised specifically to account for non-western literature, and I told him, “why do you think you cannot adopt a Leavisite approach to an African work?” He had no answer to that, he kept quiet.

Having made that observation, let me go back to ASA/ALA, on a more positive note. I see now that definitely, despite the problems I’ve evoked, there’s a gradual conversion. We now have African presidents of the ASA. We now have keynote speakers who are Africans. Many of the committees now have Africans. We are better represented on the panels, so the ASA is more democratic at least in the structure. Also, the work that we do as Africans brings greater clarification to the work of our western colleagues, so that they can see that sometimes their own approach is off the mark, so that when you’re analyzing a piece of African music, for instance, and certain rhythmic forms that we as Africans sense intuitively, as it were, and they’re trying to read those forms from the notation, you know, you can tell them, “this is how it goes, how it sounds.” But please get me right on this: I’m not saying that they cannot do African Studies because they’re not Africans. That’s not what I’m saying, but there’s always one advantage that we have over them and that is that we live those realities and we can understand them in an immediate kind of way. When Achebe says the proverb is the palm oil with which words are eaten, the underlying idea is that when you have a piece of roasted yam and you eat it with palm oil, with salt—that is a distinct experience. That’s what it suggests to me. I don’t know how many of those of our western colleagues have ever had that experience. They will see that as an image. I see it as a sensual experience. That’s what I’m trying to say.

Absolutely, but I’m sure you’ll agree that doesn’t dispense us from doing concrete research.

Of course not. I agree: our scholarship must be based ultimately on empirical research, grounded in fact, and not mere intuition.

Which reminds me. In your description earlier on of your current research, you made no mention of your recent work in Oral Literature.

That’s true. I should have, because that’s one of the projects I’m particularly preoccupied with right now, on praise poetry in Southern Africa. I got a grant for this project from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and my co-investigator is Dr. Lupenga Mpande. I went to South Africa in the year 2001 to do the fieldwork in collaboration with Professor Chris Swanepoel of the University of South Africa at Pretoria, specifically on the Sotho aspect. He’s a well-known specialist of Sotho Literature. We started in the Orange Free State, which is the Sotho speaking area of the Republic of South Africa and moved on to Lesotho—this is an enclave within the republic, which has remained an independent kingdom. We traveled to the major historic sites in Lesotho, and we recorded about thirty poets, generated something like sixty hours of footage. We’ve been transcribing and editing the oral material and are now in the process of building a website. It will eventually be open to scholars and students who can access this and see actually on the screen these poets performing. Our premise is this: that you cannot just record the verbal content of oral poetry. You have to record the whole performance, so this is a very important demonstration of what you might then call the new methodology, the new research methodology for oral literature.

The other aspect of the project concerns the Zulu, which Dr. Mphande is responsible for. I went with him last year in August 2002 to record the Chaka Day celebrations at two sites in KwaZulu/Natal. Apart from the research interests of the project itself, that particular experience gave me a direct insight into ethnic tensions in South Africa. It seems to me the figure of Chaka Day is now being employed as a cultural and symbolic reference for a specific Zulu nationalism, for a debate on the place of the Zulu as a people in the South African scheme of things. But quite apart from that political aspect, concentrating specifically on the academic, scholarly aspect, I believe we did quite a lot of work, which will go on the website along with the Sotho.

But I have another project as an outgrowth of the NEH thing, a separate project on Chaka himself: a one-hour video on him as a historical and literary figure. I want to draw on the footage we recorded and on literary texts related to Chaka—for example, the epic poem by Masizi Kunene, also on archival documents related to the historical Chaka, you know, documents in some of the museums in South Africa, especially the Kitty-Campbell museum in Durban. And if negotiations I’m involved in go well, the video will also include segments from a studio production of Senghor’s dramatic poem “Chaka.” The film was produced in the sixties and I saw it on French TV in 1966 when I was a student in Paris, towards the end of my stay there. It has been lying in the archives ever since, but I went to France last year and contacted the wife of the actor Bachir Touré, who played Chaka in the film. I was introduced to her by my friend Professor Olabiyi Yai, formerly of the University of Florida at Gainesville and now permanent delegate of the Benin Republic to UNESCO. Well, Mrs Touré got the producer to make a new copy, which we viewed together; it’s in black and white and in excellent condition. I’m now negotiating the rights so as to incorporate segments into my video project. Also, I hope to bring in parts of the opera composed by Akin Euba, using the same Senghor text, but in an English translation. The opera has been very successful and is now on CD, and I would like to bring in some of the music from that work into the video. Chaka, then, as cultural hero and dominant image of the African imagination, that’s the idea of the video project.

Thank you very much. I know this will provide a lot of material for those of us who teach Oral Literature and Oral Performance. I’m sure we’ll all be looking forward to the result of your research. One other area I really hope you can quickly go back to, just to say one or two things about it, is Modern African Literature as it has been instituted and is taught today. We talk about Anglophone African Literature, Francophone African Literature, Lusophone, Arabophone. We have all those terminologies. What have you got to say about that?

The issue you raise arises from the vague use of the term African literature. When people talk about African Literature, specifically when looking at African Literature in the European languages, they tend to just limit themselves to a single language area, so it becomes a blanket term even though in their use of the term it refers just to part of the field. Thus, the Francophones talk about “Littérature Africaine”—by which they mean only the literature in French. They make some rare exceptions: for Achebe, for Soyinka, otherwise English speaking writers do not come within their purview. Similarly, when we in the Anglophone area talk about African Literature, we tend to limit ourselves to the Anglophone Literature, maybe making allowance for a few major figures like Senghor, Laye, Beti, Ousmane, writers available in translation, but like the francophones, what we really mean when we talk about African Literature is the literature in English, with the difference that in our case, we also have a sense of the oral literature in the background. My idea would be to bring all of these literatures—at least the Francophone and the Anglophone—bring them together and also bring in North African Literature in French: the work of Assia Djebar for instance. This is one of the things I’ve tried to do with RAL. We should broaden our view of African Literature, work with a more extended conception of it.

Now, one consequence of that, one implication of that would be the language requirements for whoever wants to study African Literature. I would say the minimum is, if you’re Anglophone, you must be able to read French, and if you are Francophone, you must be able to read English. That means, then, that we have to strengthen language teaching in our schools and universities. That is one recommendation I would like to make: that we strengthen the language teaching so that every African who’s gone through school or through university has a reading proficiency in the other language. The ideal would be to have three languages: the mother tongue, the European language to function as a second language, and the other European language as a foreign language. Of course, there’s a lot of translation, but not everything can be translated, so it’s important to know a foreign language in addition to the second language. The European languages most favored are obviously French and English, but I have been particularly anxious to see the literature in Portuguese made accessible, the so-called Lusophone literature. It’s only now that that literature is beginning to be translated into English, yet there’s so much significant writing in the area: the poetry of Agostinho Neto and writers associated with the liberation struggle, the novels of Luandino Vieyra, Pepetela, Mia Couto. It’s for these reasons that I’m saying we really need to do something about language teaching within the educational system. My conclusion then is this, to sum up an issue we discussed earlier: when talking about African Literature, we must be aware that this literature also exists in other languages, not only in English or French, but also in various other languages, European and African.

Well thank you so much! These are very important issues, and I thank you so much for the time.

References

Dike, Onwuka K. Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993.

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Irele, Abiola. Tradition and the Yoruba Writer. Ife: University of Ife, Institute of African Studies 1969.

Lindfors, Bernth. Africans on State: Studies in ethnological show business. Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1999.

Miller, Christopher, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology In Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Soyinka, Wole. The burden of memory, the muse of forgiveness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. [Ann Arbor]: University of Michigan Press, 1960.

Notes

1 Western Illinois University Foundation, through a 2003 Summer Stipend award, is hereby acknowledged with gratitude for partially sponsoring this interview with a Summer Stipend as part of my Elaloro Discourse Project programs in the 2003. This interview is a chapter in my forthcoming book, Writers and Critics of African Literature, containing conversations with Achebe, Ngugi, Killam, Okpewho, Gikandi, Lindfors, Quayson, Sindiwe Magona, Garuba, Akinwumi Isola, and several others.

Abdul-Rasheed Na'Allah. “Literature, Culture, and Thought in Africa: A Conversation with Abiola Irele, Harvard University,” West Africa Review: Issue 7, 2005.