Conference Presences —
“Against All Odds: African Languages & Literatures into the 21st Century”

What I am presenting in this particular African Library entry is not a conference report, but a description of the addresses given by a small number of leading figures in African literature, as well as my impressions of the significance of these speakers.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o ( the renowned Kenyan writer who now lives in the USA in political exile from the Moi government in that country), who declared the opening day of the conference — the occasion on which he gave the keynote speech — “one of the happiest days of [his] life”, was undoubtedly the person whose strong position on the need to develop African languages and their literatures served as the chief source of inspiration to this significant event. Ngugi seems invariably to employ the most lucid examples and seemingly incontrovertible arguments in his passionate exhortations. He insisted that Africans (like everyone else, but coming back to a commonsense position which had been made to seem wrong or “uncommon” by the culturally intimidating effects of colonialism), had to start from or come back to where they are — both individually, and as societies.

His point is that acceptance of non-African cultures as our standard, or as supreme, has the detrimental result of our losing contact with our immediate environment. This is a position he has long been advocating, for instance, in his numerous essay collections and in his ‘re-adoption’ of the Gikuyu language as his mode of expression. The predictable corollary of Ngugi’s position is criticism of African authors who write in the European languages, and of the classification of the African continent (linguistically speaking) into Anglophone, Francophone and Lussophone (i.e. “Portuguese-speaking”) regions; the domination (mainly in northern Africa) of Arabic seemingly being considered a different case.

The knowledge needed by African people, contends Ngugi, must come to them in their own languages. Translations into and from other ‘regional’ languages is a better way of establishing solidarity than communicating by means of the former colonisers’ languages, he believes. He also advised diasporic Africans to ‘bring back’ the expertise they gain in other countries to their original cultures and by means of their African languages. In one of the last sessions, Ngugi reiterated this position.

He cited the examples of Descartes, Boccaccio, Dostoievsky (et al.) as writers enhancing their own languages by writing in the vernacular. Another of the four presiding chairpersons of the conference, our compatriot Mbulelo Mzamane (author and academic), was a very prominent and popular figure at a number of its gatherings, especially endearing himself to Eritreans (and others!) by means of his spontaneously composed poetic Letter[s] from [or to] Asmara. Citing the example of an 1890s poem by the Xhosa writer Citashe, Mzamane suggested that a continent-wide study of the literature associated with political liberation struggles should now be undertaken.

It was also his suggestion that the conference should result in an “Asmara Declaration” to which contributions were invited from all participants (see my SeminaarKamer entry on this website). Writing, Mzamane said, begins with the immensely difficult step of ‘becoming oneself’, and proceeds towards the arduous task of figuring out, not only how things are, but why they are so. He referred to the South African situation as an example of the way social empowerment is entangled with language. Refusal to recognise the language rights of all, or the entrenchments of elites by means of ‘favoured’ languages, were his examples of the links between failures of democracy and skewed language conditions.

That Mzamane’s enthusiasm was contagious and the issues raised, urgent, showed in the wide ranging and enthusiastic responses from the floor, and his role was probably also reflected in the nomination of South Africa as the likely location for the first ‘follow-up’ conference.

Although Ama Ata Aidoo, the brilliant and challenging Ghanaian writer (another of the Asmara conference’s four presiding chairs) could unfortunately not attend, the participation in it of the Egyptian scholar-activist, author and Asmara presiding chairperson Nawal el Saadawi was definitely one of the highlights of the event. El Saadawi, whose autobiography (A Daughter of Isis) has recently appeared, first in Arabic and now also in an English translation, qualified and practised initially as a medical doctor, later moving into psychiatry. In her wonderful (spontaneous and note-less) address she paid tribute to her grandmother who, she said, taught her her first lesson in religion and philosophy when she (an illiterate woman) replied to an Imam’s haughty put-down by saying : “I know God more than you — for he’s justice — he is not a book! God is justice, and we know God by our heart”.

El Saadawi was five years old at this time. By the time she wrote her first letter, it was addressed to Allah and she told Him: “Unless You are just I won’t believe in You; why is my brother who is less intelligent than I am, being educated, while I am not?” Like all religions, she said, justice and freedom and love are the bases of Islam.

Yet El Saadawi recognised that within all the world’s religions, women are oppressed — because those in whose interest it is to oppress always try using God so as to deligitimise resistance; as she put it, “so that you can’t argue”.

She emphasised the anti-oppressive power of (especially childhood) memory and writing and warned against the compartmentalising, disempowering effects which ‘education’ often has. Both she and her husband moved from being doctors to the role of political activists because they allowed themselves to ask why people were ill. Usually, she said, the answer was “because they are poor”, and when you then ask why they are poor, you are into politics.

El Saadawi’s appointment as a deputy minister ended in her imprisonment for the way she would rock the boat, especially on issues of women’s rights and, hence, religious issues, and she is now a banned person and on a death list because of what she writes. El Saadawi urged women to write. Creativity and writing come from the will, from a decision, she said — not from heaven, or from the unconscious, but from the soil, from pains and sorrows and the struggle to overcome them.

Feminism is no Western invention, she stressed, since the struggle for women’s rights is rooted in every country in Africa, where women struggle against Western and African oppressors. In the “Arab Women’s Solidarity Organisation” they use as their two main slogans “Unveiling the Mind” and “Unity and Power”. “Paper and pen”, her Egyptian jailer told her, “are more dangerous than a gun”.

Her writing ruined her career as a doctor and besides the period of imprisonment she underwent, she has been vilified in Egypt and throughout the Arab-speaking world. With every increase in courage, she said, the penalties intensify. Often, she felt isolated and wept alone but, despite the high price paid for activism, the reward is greater.

El Saadawi’s husband and fellow activist and writer, Sherif Hetata, is an expert on migration in Africa and Asia and also a novelist. He spent 15 years condemned to hard labour for left-wing pro-democratic activities in Egypt.

A theme of his speech was the threat to freedom posed by the ever-increasing concentration of the power of communication in the hands of fewer and fewer men who tend to be of similar political-ideological persuasions. This means, he said, that even though we have the cultures, languages and traditions, we lack the power to defend and to develop this richness.

He emphasised the need to uncover the economic realities ‘behind’ language and culture. In Egypt, he said, the reaction to globalisation has been to turn to the past in a ‘fundamentalism’ as much cultural as religious. He warned that any language can be used to mystify people and that language does not matter in itself: what counts is what you say in it; whether your use of a language contributes to the emancipation of your people and campaigns against barriers and exploitation.

Another particularly distinguished presence at the conference was that of Abdulatif Abdalla, rated by those whom I consulted as the greatest poet in the Kiswahili language. Abdalla, too, was imprisoned for five years because of his dissident position and publications vis-à-vis the Arap Moi rulership in Kenya. He read one long poem of his in an English translation and it was, indeed, hauntingly beautiful yet harrowing in its testimony to the daily political realities in present-day Kenya. There is no parading of political martyrdom in Abdalla, however — he is an immensely courteous and approachable person; a scholarly and very dignified presence, both warm and austere in his manner.

Many Eritrean writers, scholars and political leaders (quite a few of them combining all three these functions) participated in the conference. Abeba Tesfagiorgis, who wrote an important autobiographical account of her participation in the Eritrean liberation war, was one of them. A few of the +_ 500 other scholars and writers whose names I might mention are Phanuel Egejuru (she is a Nigerian who is writing Achebe’s next biography); the Ghanaian Kofi Anyidoho (a poet and former president of the African Literature Association); Bernth Lindfors (prolific commentator on African literature); Kassahun Checole (academic and publisher — president of Africa World Press and The Red Sea Press) and Thomas Hale (of Penn. State University, whose Griots and Griottes has just appeared). And then there was, at many events, the beautiful kora music and the recitals of the griot Alhaji Papa Susso.

Altogether, although I could here mention only a few of the participants, it must be clear that this was an impressive and memorable conference.

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