Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

Often important events are consciously or unconsciously overlooked by the media. One such event was the 29th Annual Conference of the African Literature Association, held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in March. Perhaps it was the fact that the conference took place during the war against Iraq which dwarfed its historic significance.

The association was founded 30 years ago, not on African soil, but in Chicago -- an offshoot of the African Studies Association, which has produced a number of important studies on Africa. American interest in Africa is nothing new, it reflects the desire of Afro-Americans to go back to and examine their roots.

The association has both black and white members, mostly writers or academics. In fact going through the papers submitted to the conference one can easily discern their predominantly academic nature.

I do not know what relations the association has with the African Writers' Union, based in Cairo, but if such relations have not been initiated they most certainly should be.

Holding a conference in Alexandria was a decision made by the association in a meeting that took place in 2002, and it was proposed that the key speech to the conference should be given by Dr Leila Ahmed, professor of women's studies and religion at Harvard University. She is the author of a more or less controversial book that created a sensation when it appeared, Women and Gender in Islam.

Going through the conference papers one discovers an important theme shared by many of them: the language used by African writers. The vanguard of African literature wrote in the language of their colonisers. Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutola from Nigeria, Awoone Cofi and Effua Suthurland from Ghana as well as Ngugi wa Thiong'o from Kenya and Alex Lagumo from South Africa all wrote novels, short stories and poems in English.

Ousmane Sembene, Diop and Leopold Senghor wrote in French, while Portuguese was the language of writers in Mozambique, Cap Verde and Angola. Explaining the use of Portuguese as a language literary medium, Gregorio Firmino writes, "The choice of Portuguese as an official language and symbol of unity was a predictable outcome given its history of use in Mozambique, the type of linguistic diversity prevailing in the country, the ideological premises related to the type of society conceived of for its future and the need to co-opt the elites of the power structure and the bureaucratic institutions of the new state. No indigenous languages could claim an overwhelming majority of speakers evenly distributed over national territory."

In fact this applies to other African regions as well, since the vast majority of African languages are not written. This is also why oral literature is the popular form of "writing" enjoyed by most people in Africa. This is also why, while novels, short stories and poems are written in English, French and Portuguese, plays tend to be presented in local languages, they depend, to a far greater extent, on dialogue. The Ghanian writer Effua Sutherland, for one dramatic pioneer, created a more or less contemporary theatre in rural areas using the local language.

There are those African writers who rebelled against using the language of the colonisers, the leader of this movement being Ngugi wa Thiongo'o. In her paper "Linguistic Imperialism and Cultural Fidelity in Ngugi's Weep Not Child," Ahmed expounds the Kenyan writer's theory. Denouncing English as a "cultural bomb in Africa", Ngugi rejected it as a means of literary expression, turning to Gikuyu, his mother tongue, instead. Ahmed believes that "this opposition between cultural fidelity and linguistic imperialism has been at the heart of Ngugi's work ever since he published his seminal novel Weep Not, Child."

She goes on to analyse Ngugi's radical stance, which he adopted later on in life. s played a strong role in social and economic mobility.

Ngugi believes that apart from control of the people's wealth, colonialism dominated the mental world of the colonised. Such control, exercised through culture, determined the way people perceived themselves and their relationship to their work. This, according to Ngugi, is done through the use of the English language. Freeing language is freeing the soul.