Conference Report — “Relocating Literature: Africa & India”

To vary the menu somewhat, this entry (like the second) reports on an interesting conference involving African and Indian literatures which was held over two days in September this year at Wits University. It was an exceptionally intelligently conceived and well-planned event for which the chief organiser, ex-Capetonian Shaun Viljoen, deserves much of the credit.
    Meenakshi Mukherjee, an Indian academic, gave the impressive first keynote address, concerned with the ironies of the academically fashionable notion of postcolonialism. Validating itself in terms of the need to recognise the cultures of formerly colonised regions like India, she argued, the postcolonial focus has merely slightly extended the borders of the limelight circle that used to focus only on Western texts. There are now, she noted, a number of international superstars among Indian writers — Salman Rushdie; Vikram Seth; Arundhati Roy and so on — who are all writers in English. Considering the range and depth of indigenous cultures in India where even now 90% of the literary texts are in local languages, many of which are works of immense sophistication, the ignorance of ‘the world’ about other literatures of this country is an absurdity.
    The American-based African intellectual Simon Gikandi gave the next keynote speech. He reported on his investigations into African engagements with Eurocentric modernity and on the ways in which African thinkers attempted to negotiate a space for the inhabitants of this continent in a development of thought — the European-based Enlightenment — which tended to be exceptionally and blatantly racist. What makes Gikandi’s position fascinating is that he not only brings a somewhat neglected area of the history of philosophy (specifically aesthetics) to attention, but that he recognises diversity and debate among African thinkers. His paper looked especially at the negritudinist position of Senghor, at Mphahlele’s powerful and carefully validated critique of that movement, at Soyinka’s Yoruba-based constructs of Africanism and at the careful philosophical manoeuvres of the African American W.E.Abraham. Du Bois, Fanon, Henry Louis Gates (Jr.), Mudimbe and Appiah were other thinkers he considered in his complex account.
    The afternoon’s keynote speakers were the Indian author Shashi Deshpande, who emphasised Indian authors’ political importance within that country, and SA writer Achmat Dangor, who redefined the notion of hybridity (within South Africa) as “a beautiful Babel of languages”, and called himself “a hybrid writer in search of a diaspora” (a “Bushie” for short). In fact, this conference was unusual as academic events (of this kind) go, in giving so much space to creative writers, whose insights tend to be conveyed in less solemn (let me not say stodgy!) ways than those of (most) academics. It is worth adding that the conference not only gave much food for thought, but also some great dishes (with an Indian emphasis) at the generously provided meals.
    The conference was also an occasion to pay tribute to the doyen of South African letters, professor Es’kia Mphahlele, and this was done in (African) style and with aplomb. Chris van Wyk’s whooping ‘exposure’ of the ‘blunder’ in Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue – that the author felt compelled to leave South Africa because he was (he thought) not contributing sufficiently to the struggle — was an electrifying moment: simultaneously funny and moving.
    There were (among the first day’s parallel sessions) papers on Zimbabwean literature and on Mphahlele’s work, which picked up on some of the issues raised in Gikandi’s and Mukherjee’s addresses.
    The next day’s keynote speeches were by Elleke Boehmer (an authority on postcolonialism and author of several novels, a British-based academic with strong South African links) and Timothy Reiss (an American who has closely associated himself with Ngugi wa Thiong’o , the Kenyan writer who is now Reiss’ colleague).
    Especially interesting, in a round table discussion that followed, was Isabel Hofmeyr’s report. She is researching the ways in which Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (the well-known Christian allegory) which missionaries brought to Africa along with the Bible, was put to use by indigenous people resisting oppression by the aged; by males or by white colonists. Such Christianised Africans considered it a ‘liberation narrative’.
    I can do no more but mention other authors, books and speakers who were featured (during the sessions I attended) at this close-packed two-day event: Zimbabwean authors (notably Yvonne Vera), specific Mphahlele texts (Down Second Avenue); the short story Mrs Plum and the novel Chirundu); Wilson Harris and Ngugi wa Thiong’o; Stuart Hall and Edward Said; Abdulrazak Gurnah; Vassanji; Narayan: Ayi Kwei Armah and Amitav Ghosh.
    Of course many other figures were discussed at sessions I could not attend. One can (unfortunately, sometimes maddeningly!) not be in three places at the same time, so this report is of course slanted by my own predilections (and sometimes obligations) to attend particular conference sessions rather than others.
    In general, I tended more towards the African and less towards the Indian side of available events, although the conference brought the two into proximity and also traced existing and plotted possible future connections. Two of the Indian names in the preceding catalogue, for example, are those of authors who wrote of and lived in African societies. Many others appeared at or were featured in sessions that I could not attend.
    The South African Indian community has a strong academic influence and history, and the literary achievements of South African writers of Indian extraction are well (if still not sufficiently) known. Perhaps (as Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn complained) the conference did not achieve enough to make the links it might have established between our respective regions or to interrogate differences and similarities in our predicaments in Africa and India. And perhaps, (as James Ogude, whose work Ngugi’s Texts and African History was launched at the conference, said), there was insufficient focus on achieving more useful definitions of the greater humiliation suffered by African cultures. Yet this conference did much to equip those who attended it with impressions and information of the kind needed to enable us to reconceive the outlines of the present cultural world order, and to emphasise the importance of strategic alliances between cultures existing beyond the high-technology centres of the world.

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