WEST AFRICA REVIEW ISSN: 1525-4488 Issue 8 (2005)

Abdul-Rasheed Na’Allah

In their “Acknowledgements” in a recent book they edited in honor of Bernth Lindfors, Barbara Harlow and Toyin Falola identify what, in their opinion, “characterize the enormous body of Lindfors’s own oeuvre” (ix), describing Lindfors variously as: “Reader and writer, organizer and mobilizer, initiator and instigator, colleague, conferee and collaborator, intercontinental traveler, scholar and emissary, . . . [he] has contributed importantly—at times well-nigh single-handedly—to placing Africa and its literature on the curricular map of the Euro-American academy” (ix). In a “Foreword,” Stephen Arnold also describes Lindfors, “vintage Lindfors— controversial, provocative, historical, documentary, seminal, and often finding fun while always maintaining the highest standards of literary scholarship” (Arnold vi). None of these words by Harlow and Falola and by Arnold exaggerate what Lindfors has been for African literature! Several controversies have followed his positions or actions at different times, from accusations that greeted his acquisition of Tutuola’s manuscripts, some of his criticisms of Wole Soyinka or even Cyprian Ekwensi, to the many blame games about the amount of space RAL gave to African women writers or criticism of African women writing when he was editor, etc. Yet, Lindfors is not afraid of controversies. As Gibbs² puts it, “Lindfors often gets into fights. It is partly his fault—a fault, because he is argumentative, that he regards as a virtue” (“Miscellaneous” 14-15). He is not only a leading critic of African literature, his obvious passion for history and his pursuit of documenting African literary history has made him the undisputable leading scholar, since Albert Gérard, of African literary history. The impressive list of his publications in this area is an excellent evidence of his dedication to it.

Originally from around Umeã, Sweden, Lindfors, as a young man during World War II, migrated with his parents to the United States. He attended Oberlin College, Harvard University, Northwestern University and later, after his two-year stay in Kenya, East Africa, the University of California at Los Angeles. He, together with his wife Judy, went to Kenya as a part of Teachers for East Africa Scheme (“Miscellaneous” 22) where they both taught in a boys secondary school for two years. It was while in Kenya that Lindfors developed passion for African literature and with funding opportunity coming up he enrolled at the University of California at Los Angeles for a doctorate degree and wrote his dissertation on “Nigerian Fiction in English” (“Miscellaneous” 23). Lindfors’s achievements in African scholarship have thus been celebrated in several ways. He was awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the University of Umeã, and has received many other honors, awards and prizes (NEH, Fulbright, Guggenheim, etc) including Gold Medal of the English Academy of Southern Africa; Pro Bene Meritis Award, University of Texas at Austin; Outstanding Service Award, African Literature Association; Award of Excellence in the Criticism of African Literature, University of Calabar, Nigeria; and another honorary doctorate degree from the University of Kwazulu-Natal (then University of Natal), South Africa.

Lindfors achieved many pioneering successes in African literary scholarship. He not only founded the leading journal, Research in African Literatures, but also initiated, with Donald Herdeck and Three Continents Press, the Critical Perspective series and became its commissioning agent (“Miscellaneous” 26). He, with other colleagues, hosted the first conference of the African Literature Association in Austin, Texas; and with Reinhard Sander, founded and worked on series of the Dictionary of Literary Biographies; and also Lindfors was the first African literature scholar to present an MLA’s Approaches to Teaching Literature volume, which he wrote on Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. For reasons of space, I will list only a few of his publications here. Some of his books include: Folklore in Nigerian literature (1973); Critical perspectives on Amos Tutuola (1975); Black African literature in English: a guide to information sources (1979-); Early Nigerian literature (1982); Research priorities in African literatures (1984); Approaches to teaching Achebe's Things fall apart (1991); Popular Literatures in Africa (1991); Long drums and canons: teaching and researching African literatures (1995); African textualities: texts, pre-texts, and contexts of African literature (1997); Conversations with Chinua Achebe (1997); Africans on stage: studies in ethnological show business (1999); Africa talks back: interviews with Anglophone African authors (2004); Ngugi wa Thiong'o speaks: interviews with the Kenyan writer (2006); and the list is just beginning.

Professor Lindfors has retired from the University of Texas at Austin. He recently negotiated a deal, through his alma mater, Oberlin College, that places his personal library at the University of Kwazulu-Natal. During a private discussion at Austin, he told me his wish for this collection to serve, in particular, scholars from across African academia through residency fellowships in Kwazulu-Natal that would enable them to take time off their teaching schedules to research using those materials. As evidence that he, though retired, is not tired, he is currently researching the life and achievements of Ira Aldridge (1807-1876), the famous African actor who performed across European.

My first interview with Bernth Lindfors was in 1996 at West Chester University, West Chester, Pennsylvania (see “Bernth Lindfors and the Concept of Popular Literatures in Africa” 43–68). The present conversation was done at the Northwestern University campus in Evanston, Illinois on 14^th of March 2002. Bernth was in another round of his many research visits to his old campus to work at the Africana Library, reading Nigerian Newspapers, and combing the library for recent works by African writers and critics, and he was kind enough to allow me some share from his schedule. I asked him about how he found Research in African Literatures, about individuals and institutions that played crucial roles in the journal during those early years, and about the many challenges he faced as editor and founder of the journal. Bernth was very generous with his responses as he was with his time and I am sure generations of Africanists world over would benefit from this interview as they try to understand the many words and actions of this guru of African literature. My conversation with Lindfors thus comes below with his responses following my questions. This was a spontaneous encounter, as no prior questions were prepared, and Bernth did not know that my questions this time would focus on RAL.

The years 1967 to 1969 were important moments here in America, especially at universities, because of the movement toward establishing Black Studies programs. Did that have anything to do with your starting Research in African Literatures?

Yes, it had everything to do with it because the Sixties were a very troubled period in the United States. It was the time of the Vietnam War, the Free Speech movement and the unrest at the University of California at Berkeley. It was also a time when the cities were burning down with riots in the ghettos of Watts, Newark, Detroit. Lots of places were having difficulties, and universities began to recognize that not enough attention had been paid to the black experience in America, so they wanted to address this. There had been protests on many campuses, guns being brandished by students at Cornell, if you recall, so universities throughout the United States were attempting to adjust to these radical changes. One way they did that was to establish Black Studies programs and employ people to teach not only African-American studies but also African Studies as part of the black American experience.

Texas was just starting to get such a program off the ground when I was finishing my graduate studies and looking for a job. In fact, at that time, at the end of the Sixties—I completed my doctorate in 1969—there were so many places that were eager to get people to teach in this new area that someone coming out of graduate school with a dissertation on African literature was a sought-after prospect. Texas had ambitions to develop an African and African-American Studies program, and it was people associated with that effort who were attempting to recruit me. They heard that I was interested in starting a newsletter dealing with African literature, mainly to link up the few specialists who were scattered throughout the American academic world. Back then, and even in most places today, there was no more than one African literature teacher on any campus except of course the University of Wisconsin at Madison, which in 1964 had started a Ph.D. program in African languages and literatures. That program had several faculty members attached to it, but at other institutions the person who taught African literature was an isolated individual who didn’t have any colleagues on campus or nearby working in the same field. I wanted to create a mechanism of communication for that far-flung community—a very small community back in the Sixties.

On hearing that I had this modest intention, the recruitment team at Texas asked, “Why don’t you turn it into a journal?” Indeed, they made this possibility sound so attractive that I decided to go there and launch Research in African Literatures, the first issues of which came out in 1970. At that time, the African and African-American Studies program initiative at the University of Texas was split into two camps: one was the teaching program that fielded the courses that were developed and cross-listed in various academic departments, and the other was a Research Institute where there was money set aside to encourage and support research of various kinds. The Research Institute was headed by Roger Abrahams, a well-known folklorist who worked primarily in African-American studies but had a strong interest in African studies as well. It was his suggestion that we give away the journal free of charge. This was a very enlightened way to start a new academic publication, for it meant that we didn’t have to subsist on paid subscriptions. And as a consequence, we immediately became very popular. All kinds of people—even prisoners and high school students—were writing in asking for it, and we were also deliberately sending it out to institutions worldwide, in particular to African university libraries. As the number of subscribers grew, so did the expense of producing the journal. After the first three years we had to begin charging individuals and institutions in America and Europe a subscription fee, but we continued to provide our subscribers in Africa with free copies for another three years.

By this time RAL had become highly visible. The journal was very handsomely produced by professional book designers at the University of Texas, and each issue was illustrated by an African artist. This attracted attention, and we soon began receiving a steady stream of contributions, a stream that rapidly turned into a veritable flood. We had started as a biannual publication, but after seven years we turned tri-quarterly and three years later we became a regular quarterly. The field was growing and we felt we had to grow with it. Even so, we did not have enough space to accommodate all the good submissions we received. We had to maintain extremely high standards and return a lot of material that we felt would be more suitable for other journals. We tried to review as many scholarly books as possible, and this left less space for substantive articles.

I am really delighted that RAL was taken over by Indiana University Press in 1990 when I gave up the editorship, because IUP, a major publisher of Africana, was willing to expand the journal beyond the dimensions that the University of Texas Press was able to sustain. When RAL turned quarterly, we had a limit of one hundred and forty-four pages per issue, and we couldn’t exceed four times that amount in any given year. One might think that with nearly six hundred pages at our disposal annually, we could do quite a lot, and we did publish a great deal of valuable material, but the field was continuing to grow at such a pace that RAL really needed extra pages to develop to the point where it is now. 

When you started, did you have certain guidelines for selecting the articles that went into the early issues, especially those in the first three years? Were there areas in which you were particularly interested? If so, why those areas?

Well, we wanted to focus solely on African literatures. The journal is called Research in African Literatures, plural, which meant that we were interested in verbal expression, oral and written, from all over the African continent. We did not want to publish material on African-American literature, on Caribbean literature or black British writing unless it was somehow linked directly to literatures produced by Africans. There were already plenty of other vehicles catering to scholarship on the verbal art of the wider black world, so we wanted to adhere to a strictly African focus. Also, since we were a research journal, we wanted articles to be properly researched. “New Criticism” of the sort that relied entirely on the musings, imaginings, interpretations or opinions of a single critic were of far less interest to us than was a solidly researched article on historical, biographical or theoretical issues. In addition, we wanted to publish scholarship on African language literatures, and we had some very good contributions of this kind in those earlier years, some of them coming from doctoral students who were working on aspects of their own ethnic literature. I remember for instance that we published the first substantial article on the history of Kikongo literature written by one of Albert Gérard’s Congolese students in Belgium. It was a long article for us, some forty pages or so in print with accompanying illustrations, but it was the first serious attempt to put on record the history of that literature. That’s the kind of thing we were eager to get. We didn’t publish interviews with African authors even though we had many submitted. Of the many excellent scholarly pieces that did come in, a good quantity were from the African continent itself, which was quite refreshing. We weren’t just drawing upon New World scholars, but rather the journal seemed to be circulating to such an extent in Africa that African scholars were contributing fine articles too.

So what kind of submissions were you receiving?

All kinds of articles—on individual authors, on genres, on history, on a wide variety of topics. Each issue became a loose grab-bag of ideas, depending on what was submitted. Also, as we began to accrue a large backlog of accepted material it became possible to shape individual issues around a particular theme—Nigerian literature, for example—or perhaps to create a special number on a specific author—Achebe, Soyinka, Ngugi—based on what we had in our files. After we turned quarterly, we also had guest editors collecting material for special issues that would focus on a specific theme or on literature from a particular area of Africa. Such editors would be responsible for trying to gather a sufficient number of contributions, but all the contributions submitted had to go through normal screening by our editorial board so they weren’t automatically or routinely accepted. Some of our advisory editors were extremely demanding but also very helpful to authors by writing extensive comments on submissions in an effort to improve them. They would help authors to develop certain ideas or would refer them to pertinent scholarship they might not have adequately considered or even consulted. We had very good advisory editors, and everything sent to them had the name of the author deleted. We wanted each piece to be judged on its own merits, on the quality of the argument presented, rather than on the name or reputation of the contributor. This policy seems to have been misunderstood by some scholars who may have felt that we were unjustly discriminating against them. A few apparently assumed that I made all the decisions even though the articles were being sent to specialist readers. If something came in on, say, Hausa literature, how could I assess it? It would have to go to readers who were specialists on that literature, and if we didn’t have one or two of them on our advisory board, we would seek out others who had the necessary expertise. We got a lot of advice from scholars whose names did not appear on the masthead of the journal. But occasionally, perhaps when someone had several articles in a row rejected, I would be blamed for discriminating against this individual or this aggrieved member of a group. I sometimes became the lightning rod for a lot of misdirected sound and fury.

Can you remember some of these specific attacks?

I don’t want to mention names, but I know that I made a lot of enemies during those years because it was imagined that I was making all the editorial decisions. The messenger was being blamed for the message relayed. Some of this animosity even spilled over into print. I remember being surprised by one article that contained a footnote stating that I as editor had discriminated against female scholars from Africa because very few of them had succeeded in publishing articles in RAL. Of course, at that time there were very few women teaching in African universities, and it is possible that this is part of the reason we seldom received submissions from them that we could publish. But what this critic seems to have failed to comprehend is that an author’s name and gender were never part of our assessment process; there is no way that advisory editors involved in our blind reviewing process could tell if a contributor was female or African or anything else. Also, submissions were normally sent out to three advisory editors so that if there was a split vote, we would have a majority decision without my intervention. I may have functioned as the secretary of the jury but more often than not I wasn’t one of the judges.

I recall that on another occasion I was approached at a conference by someone who was very upset about a review he had heard had appeared in RAL which had said something critical about his work. This scholar insisted that I should have rejected the review because the reviewer obviously didn’t know anything about African literature. This seemed to me to be an extraordinary demand, based entirely on hearsay evidence, but the scholar felt that his reputation had suffered and that I was to blame because I had not censored or refused to publish an opinion that he believed may have questioned in some way his ultimate authority in the field.

I want you to go back to the beginning of RAL. When you were writing the editorial for the first issue of the journal, what was going through your mind? What did you want to emphasize?

To answer that, I would have to look at that editorial again. I remember generally what my feeling was at that time and I tried to express it. (Incidentally, that’s the only piece I have ever written for RAL, just a page at the beginning. Alain Ricard has written an article on that editorial analyzing what was stated there and what was actually practiced in the journal.) The main idea behind the founding of the journal was the desire to create a vehicle for African literature scholars that would be as comprehensive, as all-encompassing as possible and would promote serious commentary on these new literatures that were emerging. I wanted to provide an outlet for scholars who might not have anywhere else to send their work because Western journals often didn’t know anything about this field and had no way of evaluating the quality of articles dealing with it.

We had some extremely good contributions at the outset that I think set the tone for the journal. This was very helpful because much of what was being done in those days was brand-new research. People who had thought deeply about these literatures were writing some very good stuff, and I felt we could build on this and encourage others by the example of what we published. In those early issues we also tried to give some attention to what scholars were saying at conferences; we even published abstracts of conference papers, research reports of various kinds, bibliographies—whatever might help a fellow scholar. We wanted to make people aware of who was doing research in an area that they might be interested in exploring, so we monitored the conferences where papers on African literature were being presented: the African Studies Association, the American Folklore Society, various regional branches of the Modern Language Association, etc. As time passed, that kind of reportage tended to disappear from RAL, crowded out by more substantive commentary. Ten years after we started, it was no longer necessary to publicize that kind of activity because there was so much of it going on. And conference papers tend to be very ephemeral anyway, until they are formalized and expanded and developed to the point where they can stand on their own as printed articles.

During the second decade you were editor, did you see some results that you could link to the earlier objective of encouraging scholars to do responsible research? Did other journals try to emulate what RAL had achieved?

I think one can see from the number of citations to articles in RAL that it has fulfilled the function of alerting people to ideas that are now in general circulation. If someone is writing on a particular subject and is citing previous scholarship, it will often be an article in RAL that serves as a relevant reference. Because RAL had wide circulation and because it was one of the first African literature journals to appear, it did, I think, make an impact.

Also, RAL never failed to come out on time, and that made it different from some journals that started with a lot of steam but then ran out of energy or faced insurmountable difficulties. I believe it was Kole Omotoso who coined the phrase “the abiku syndrome of journal publishing,” a situation in which journals are born but die prematurely and then have to be reborn in another guise. One can understand why new journals might begin with something of a splash but then might not be able to sustain momentum if they have to rely principally on paid subscriptions. A journal needs a sugar daddy or some other dependable means of support to continue publishing on a regular basis.

Nowadays there are quite a number of new journals popping up. In some areas of Africa that were having severe economic problems, the specialized academic media published by universities were drying up. What took their place—in Nigeria at least—were newspapers that started carrying cultural pages. The Guardian in Lagos was one of the pioneers in publishing literary criticism on a regular basis, and other papers quickly followed suit. This was a new development that democratized literary discussion in Nigeria because anyone could write a rejoinder or a letter to the editor disagreeing with professor so and so and debating an issue. There was good critical crossfire in these papers, and that signaled a very healthy literary culture. Today, in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, the academic journal is beginning to make a comeback so there are additional indigenous opportunities for literary discussion and debate. RAL is certainly not alone or unique in providing an outlet for serious scholarship.

How would you describe the quality of the writing in African and non-African critical journals? Are there significant differences? Has the literature itself changed?

Western critics seem to be paying more attention to current critical theory and to new ideas that are in circulation throughout the Western academic world. I think this has been the case especially in the past ten years or so, ever since the editorial office of RAL moved to Ohio State University. The first issue that the new editor, the late Richard Bjornson, put out was concerned with critical theory. This was a dimension that the earlier RAL lacked because we received very few contributions that were alert to what was going on in elite critical circles in Paris, London or New York. In recent years scholars have been able to test some of these theories or to develop new ones that take into account an African orientation to expressive phenomena. One tends to see increased attention to critical theory in many other journals as well. This is not to say that we are being overburdened with new critical terminology, though that does occasionally occur in some pieces. Rather, I think it shows that scholars today are beginning to think in different ways about African literature than they did when the field was just opening up and they were focusing initially on individual authors, on national literatures, or on smaller matters that could be explored almost exhaustively because there was so little to deal with. In the old days, one could write a survey article on the Nigerian novel in a particular year and cover only half a dozen texts. Nowadays you can’t even count the number of novels that come out in Nigeria annually; you don’t even know where to look to find all of them. So it’s a different playing field now, and the expansion of that field has led to different ways of talking about literature, of writing about it, of engaging with it. I think all this is wonderful.

Sometimes unusual circumstances in one particular country will generate a new kind of commentary. For example, the transition to full democracy in South Africa has led to a reassessment of what writers there should be writing about. Nigeria’s postmortem on its civil war, Uganda’s campaign against AIDS, Malawi’s analysis of repressive autocracy—all these responses to individual national experiences are diversifying African literature and its criticism. It used to be the case that when one talked about culture conflict in West African fiction, one could include the whole of West Africa because all the writers were doing essentially the same kind of work, but now there is often a specificity based on the locale that the writing is coming from. And at the same time there is the internationalization of a lot of African experience. You have African writers who are living outside of Africa, some of them writing about experiences outside Africa, and such literature takes on a different coloring. Kwame Anthony Appiah, for instance, has published three mystery novels, one of which is set in Cambridge University and has only British characters. Is this an African novel? New African writing is acquiring all kinds of dimensions that it once did not have.

To return for a moment to RAL, how did it happen that the journal moved from Texas to Ohio and specifically to Indiana University Press? Who first published it?

At first it was sponsored, financed and published by the African and African-American Research Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. Then at the point when it became a commercial enterprise requiring paid subscriptions, RAL was taken over by the University of Texas Press which had a journals division that fielded a number of academic journals. That was a very generous gesture because the UT Press had previously published very little on Africa. They were a major publisher of books on Texas, the Southwest, Mexico and Latin America, but Africa was a new world for them. It just wasn’t part of their normal publishing program. But they took on RAL without any hesitation and were very cooperative and supportive. In fact, they were the ones who suggested an expansion to quarterly status. So we had a fine working relationship with them, and they gave us excellent professional help.

The University was supportive too. At one point when all the editors on campus were feeling under pressure because the Texas Legislature had mandated new workload rules that excluded giving course relief for editing, a number of us went to the Dean of Graduate Studies to plead for assistance. What we asked for was the creation of a postgraduate assistantship in editing that could be awarded by each journal to a different student each year. This was granted, and it saved me at that time. Earlier I used to have a part-time undergraduate assistant or limited access to a secretary at the African and African-American Research Institute who could help me with correspondence, proofreading and other matters, but as the volume of contributions to RAL grew and the correspondence load increased, I really needed more regular secretarial help, and that came in the form of a graduate editorial fellow who was selected in a campus-wide competition. The field of the student didn’t matter. We had applicants from every kind of academic discipline, and those awarded the fellowship were excellent. Some of the editorial fellows I had are now active members of the African Literature Association, but others came from a variety of different campus departments and have not kept up their involvement in African literature.

For a time this kind of assistance enabled me to keep pace with the expansion of the journal, but as the field continued to grow and the workload on the journal continued to increase, I began to feel that it was time for someone else to take over, so I advertised for a successor and for a new home for the journal. We had interested responses from a few campuses that were serious about taking on the challenge of editing RAL, and it was Richard Bjornson at Ohio State University who put in the strongest bid. He was a comparative literature scholar with a wide range of knowledge who was doing significant work on African literature, and he had been promised adequate support from his department. An arrangement was worked out where he would edit the journal in Ohio and it would be published by Indiana University Press. This turned out to be an excellent collaboration, the best possible for RAL.

When you started the journal, did it have any connection with the African Studies Association or the African Literature Association?

Yes, and there was a relationship with another academic body as well. When we started RAL, it was called an official journal of both the African Literatures Seminar of the Modern Language Association and the African Literature Committee of the African Studies Association. The African Literature Association didn’t exist at that time, but when the ALA was founded in 1975, I proposed that RAL be adopted as one of its official journals too. I didn’t ask for it to be the official journal of the ALA because I wanted other journals to have the advantage of a connection with the ALA too. I also wanted RAL’s editorial board to be independent and not tied to one academic body or another. The idea was to build as many bridges as possible and to connect with a number of existing institutions without necessarily committing ourselves to whatever a particular organization was interested in promoting. So we tried to make strategic alliances that did not tie us down to a single orientation but maximized opportunities not only for increasing subscriptions but also for encouraging involvement in the journal.

Would you say that RAL has helped to establish African literatures as a discipline in the United States?

I think the journal has achieved a measure of recognition and reputation not only in America but elsewhere as well. In that way it has helped to professionalize the field. For instance, I remember occasionally receiving letters thanking RAL for having published an article because it was helpful in a promotion or tenure decision or something of that sort. In other words, the journal was respected by professional colleagues regardless of whether they worked in African literatures or not. In this way RAL has been helpful to the careers of those who have published in it; that is, they have won some recognition and reward for having done so, and perhaps this is a part of the professionalization of African literature studies not only in the United States but also abroad. But this is not the only way that the journal has helped to establish a new discipline. Even more important has been its role in making available to an international public some good thinking about African writing and African orature.

When you started at the University of Texas, there were only a limited number of teaching positions available in African literature. Today there are many. RAL, by focusing on serious research, may have helped to accelerate the growth of the field by giving it some stature.

The journal may have been one avenue by which the field was given some visibility and credibility in the American academic world. RAL was seen as a serious venture that was promoting good scholarship. It also may have helped to make people aware of the great diversity of literatures in Africa. Scholars who were working in one corner of the field were actually contributing to something much larger by widening the intellectual horizons of their peers.

I think it has been easier for African literature teachers to get a footing in certain fields within the American academic world than in others. French African literature probably fit more easily into French departments than anglophone African literature fit into English departments. Some comparative literature programs were quick to see the value of including francophone, anglophone and lusophone varieties of African literature in their offerings; others were not, preferring to remain steadfastly Eurocentric.

Another striking phenomenon in the wider sphere of anglophone studies is that there is greater curricular change on the European continent than there is in England or America. Why? Because people who are teaching English at universities in Spain or Germany or France or elsewhere in Europe are aware that the English language is being used internationally. It’s not perceived as just the mother tongue of the British or the Americans, so there are now organizations in European countries that make space in their annual conferences for the new literatures written in English. There is also an Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies that has branches spread throughout the English-speaking world; this organization has encouraged African literature studies in places such as India, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the West Indies. So one finds pockets of activity all over the globe now, with scholars in remote locations working very productively. For more than three decades RAL has helped to provide an outlet for their research.

Today African literatures are being taught and studied all over the world. In the United States some of the recent hiring of Africanists has been done under the rubric of postcolonial literature or world literature or black literature. The initiative often came from Black Studies departments or from Folklore or Comparative Literature or from some other program that wanted to cover a part of the world that was being ignored. English departments traditionally had a kind of binocular vision that was confined to the literatures of England and North America; they even ignored Canada, a next-door neighbor whose writers also expressed themselves in English.

However, as African and other non-British and non-American writers began to gain increased notoriety by winning many of the major international literary awards, it gradually became apparent that the most vigorous writing in English in contemporary times was coming from the peripheries, not from the old centers of the anglophone world. The slogan “the empire writes back” gained popularity as people began to realize that they were missing something if they neglected to pay attention to some of these fresh, new voices.

Often it was Fulbright teachers, Peace Corps volunteers or others who had had some direct contact with Africa who came back to the United States with the desire to do a Ph.D. in African literature. This has become possible in a way that would have been unthinkable forty years ago. Now there are dissertations being written in many universities, some of which have no formal program of African studies on campus. These may be isolated individuals, but they join the African Literature Association, submit articles to RAL and other periodicals, and get professionally engaged in a variety of interesting ways. They’re involved in creating a whole new world of scholarship and teaching.

When RAL started charging subscription fees in America and Europe, and later in Africa, do you recall how many universities continued receiving it?

The universities that had been receiving RAL from the beginning, had an interest in the area, and had adequate financial resources continued their subscriptions. We did lose some subscribers, often from some of the smaller institutions in the west. We tried our best to keep subscriptions going to Africa and there were various initiatives to support this. One was through the African Literature Association, which subsidized the postage and subscription fees to all African university libraries. Another was when we were closing down the editorial office in Texas, and we cleared all the back issues in our storeroom by offering them to individuals and institutions for only the price of the postage. Some people purchased these issues for colleagues in Africa.

Besides graduate students, who worked with you while you were editor of RAL? Who served on your editorial board and made the biggest contributions?

Perhaps the individual who was consulted most often and gave the greatest amount of feedback was the late Albert Gérard, simply because his scope was so large. He knew the history of many of these literatures and could make perceptive comments and suggestions. He had very high standards, but I could send something to him and get an informed response a few days later. Although he knew no African languages, he knew all the scholarship written in European languages on African language literatures so even in this field one could rely to some extent on his assessments. But his main responsibility was to provide input on submissions dealing with anglophone and francophone literatures.

We had a very good board of advisory editors and also a lot of specialist readers whom we consulted when something arrived that was within their area of expertise. They would be sent the article blind—that is, with no name on it—and when the expert feedback was relayed to the author, that also was sent blind. We didn’t reveal who had made the comment but offered the assessment as assistance to the contributor. Daniel Kunene, Dan Ben-Amos, Richard Bjornson and Alain Ricard helped out quite often, writing very insightful reports. When we received contributions on women writers, we would make an attempt to get female scholars to comment on them. For instance, if we got an essay on Flora Nwapa, we would send it round to people who were working on her. To do this, it was helpful to know what kind of research was being done in the field. Some of the bibliographical work I had done had made me aware of who had expertise on a particular topic. Also, the many books that passed through the office for review led me to a number of knowledgeable individuals for good advice.

How much material did you receive on African language literatures?

We didn’t receive much, but when it came in, we were very glad to have it if it was good. When we accepted a piece, it sometimes presented problems for the press if special scripts with unusual accent marks or odd characters were needed, but their typesetters never objected; it was just a new kind of challenge for them.

Unfortunately, scholars based in Africa sometimes did not have access to current scholarship on the subject on which they were writing. That was a real problem, but we tried to help them as much as we could. On the other hand, there were American and European scholars who were very well informed on relevant recent scholarship but did not have a deep knowledge of a text and couldn’t deal with some of the nuances of the language in which it was written. So you might have a top-heavy theoretical article coming in from a western scholar and a bottom-heavy article, if you like, coming from a scholar in Africa who had done wonderful fieldwork but needed to refine his analysis so it would relate in a significant way to similar work that was being done elsewhere in the academic community. Of course, severe economic problems in much of Africa made it difficult for many libraries and individuals there to obtain the latest books and journals, especially those published in the west. A few African scholars managed to get access to needed materials by taking a sabbatical in Europe or the United States and loading up on what was coming out. They could then attune their remarks to an international wavelength of scholarship.

These are some of the difficulties we faced with regard to African language literatures, but I think there were a sufficient number of successful efforts we were able to publish. Obviously we were not able to cover the entire continent or to feature every African language literature, but occasionally we would run a special number on some aspect of oral literature that would bring us some fresh material.

Did you try to generate contributions on women’s writing too?

Yes, we organized a special issue on that topic at a time when African women writers were becoming more numerous and much more visible. We received a large number of contributions and consequently had to be very selective in what we chose to publish, so I fear we disappointed quite a few contributors, many of whom were women. However, our guest editors for that issue were women, too, as were most of our specialist readers, so I don’t think anyone can claim that RAL’s choices for inclusion reflected a male bias.

What frustrations did you face as an editor?

The major frustration was not having enough space for all the good articles that were coming in. Sometimes we had to delay publishing an article for a year or more because we had such a huge backlog of previously accepted material. This must have bothered contributors too, even though we seldom got complaints. Our focus on research and on African literatures caused us to reject a number of articles that were perfectly acceptable but better suited to a different kind of journal. In addition, one sometimes had problems getting assigned book reviews submitted promptly; the book would be sent out to a reviewer and then there would be a long, deafening silence. Reminders would be blithely ignored. One learned very quickly not to rely on such mute reviewers.

I suppose at times I felt quite overwhelmed when I would go on research leave abroad but would still have to deal with all the journal correspondence by sending weekly tapes back to my student assistant. This took a big bite out of my research time and sometimes slowed down production schedules a bit. But I learned a lot from doing the work, and in retrospect I don’t mind having put twenty years of my life into editing RAL. The rewards and satisfactions were always far greater than the frustrations.

Works Cited

Arnold, Stephen H. “Preface,” Popular Literatures in Africa. AWP, 1991.

Falola and Barbara Harlow, Palaver of African Literature. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2002.

Gibes, James. “On Miscellaneous Essays,” Palaver of African Literature. Trenton: AWP, 2002.

------. Ed. Critical Perspectives on Wole Soyinka. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980.

Gibbs, James and Bernth Lindfors. Research on Wole Soyinka. Trenton: AWP, 1993.

Lindfors, Bernth. Popular Literatures in Africa. AWP, 1991.

Na’Allah, Abdul-Rasheed. “Bernth Lindfors and the Concept of Popular Literatures in Africa,” Palaver of African Literature. Trenton: AWP, 2002. 43 – 68

Notes

Citation Format:

Abdul Rasheed Na'Allah. “Research in African Literatures and African Studies in America: A Conversation With Bernth Lindfors, University of Texas at Austin,” West Africa Review: Issue 8, 2005.

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