Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

It is always interesting to relive one's memories, as happened to me recently during the meeting of African and Asian writers which took place in Cairo. Sitting with and talking to Ghanaian professor and poet Atukwei Okai brought back an important event which took place in 1985. This was a seminar organised by the late Egyptian writer Lutfi El-Kholi, to create an organisation for intellectuals of the world. Okai was there representing the Pan-African Writers' Association of which he was, and still is, secretary-general.

During his 1988 visit to Egypt, Okai was so taken up with what he experienced that he wrote a poem which he recited at the Akhenaton Gallery. The poem was inspired by Okai's visit to the Egyptian Museum, where he heard the story of the Rosetta Stone. Hence he gave his long poem the title "The Rosetta Stone in the Meantime of Eternity". It begins with the line "It is like a dream. I am in Egypt", and then goes on to evoke African and Egyptian images.

The poem closes with:

"Upon the shifting forehead of Cairo's

Golden sands,

I read the hieroglyphics of time

and my heart understands:

IN THE MEANTIME OF ETERNITY

Discover the key

that breaks the code

Of the oracle of our destiny."

In his address to the opening ceremony of the Afro- Asian writers' meeting, Okai gave the history of the Pan- African Writers' Association (PAWA), a dream which obsessed African writers decades before the independence of their countries. There were efforts to create such an association, starting in 1956 with the Conference of Black People's Culture held in Paris. But it was only in 1989 that the association came into being.

From 7 to 11 November of that year representatives from over 36 African countries formally signed the Declaration and Constitution that led to the establishment of PAWA. The 7th of November was declared International African Writers' Day, by the Conference of African Ministers of Education and Culture which met in Coutonou, Benin, in 1991.

PAWA is made up of 52 national writers' associations on the continent "to contribute its quota to moral, cultural and intellectual renaissance in Africa," in Okai's words. PAWA is committed to the ideals of "a world that places emphasis upon dignity, freedom from poverty, freedom from preventable diseases, and freedom from illiteracy and freedom from war". Okai stressed the fact that African writers are committed to do whatever they can to achieve these freedoms.

In 2004 a conference of intellectuals from Africa and the Diaspora convened in Dakar. At that event the Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka stated that there was "no lavender word" for genocide. African writers "are aware, maintain and are prepared to declare that there is no lavender word for lack of education and illiteracy."

The Pan-African Writers' Association was established, in the words of Okai, "on the conviction that literature is the testimony of the people's creativity and that it has a determining influence on national development for political, social and economic liberation of the continent. It is determined to contribute to the revalorisation of African cultural identity, putting a spurt on Pan- Africanism and the struggle against all forms of racial discrimination. PAWA is committed to the promotion of world peace through literature."

In this respect I am reminded of Salem Ahmed Salem, former secretary-general of the Organisation of African Unity. In a PAWA forum in 1991, he said "African writers can use their pens, skills and gifts to sensitise the ordinary African people to the basic truism that, sharing as they all do, a common destiny, they owe it to themselves to ensure that the economic integration of the continent, the only road, is embarked on."