2022 PAWA conference: Swedish author, Bernth Lindfors, highlights growth of African literature in 60 years

AFTER the first African Literature and Writers Conference held in Makerere, Uganda in June 1962, African writers from 38 countries gathered at the University of Ibadan, from June 23 to 25, to discuss the gains of the Makerere conference and how far African literature has gone.

At that 1962 conference, writers who are today known as the progenitors of the African literature were present, including Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, Obi Wali, Christopher Okigbo, Bernard Fonlon, Frances Ademola, Cameron Duodu, Kofi Awoonor, Ezekiel Mphalele, Bloke Modisane, Lewis Nkosi, Dennis Brutus, Arthur Maimane, Ngugi wa Thiongo, Robert Serumaga, among others.

That conference, which was the first major international gathering of writers and critics of African literature on the African continent, also coincided with the period when most African countries were gaining independence from their colonial masters.

Some questions raised and debated during that conference include what constitutes African literature? Is it literature written by Africans, literature that depicts the African experience? Does African literature have to be written in African language?

At that conference, several nationalist writers refused to acknowledge any literature written in non-African languages as being African literature.

In fact, Ngugi wa Thiongo noted the irony of the conference’s title, in that it excluded a great part of the population that did not write in English while trying to define African literature, but accepting that it must be in English.

Now, 60 years after, 80-year-old Swedish author, Bernth Lindfors, in his keynote presentation virtually, “The Emergence of African Literature as a Robust Academic Discipline,” described how far African literature has grown over the years.

Lindfors said when the Makerere conference was held in Kampala for a week on June 11, 1962, he was only a day’s drive away in Western Kenya, but could not take time off to attend.

“I was then starting my second year of teaching English and History at a boys’ boarding school in Kisii, a small town not far from Lake Victoria.

“In addition to preparing fourth-year students for the looming Cambridge School Certificate examination, I was also directing a production of the school play, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, which was a set book for that examination.

“But the main reason I could not get away was that my wife had just given birth to our first child on May 30th, Memorial Day, less than two weeks before the conference, so I had an obligation to stay home to assist with the fundamental mechanics of diaper duty.”

However, Lindfors admitted he had been reading African literature a lot at that time.

“It was at Makerere that I had started reading African literature during a six-week orientation programme we had there prior to going out to our school.

“Back in those days, the library at Makerere had an enlightened lending policy allowing anyone who had been associated with the university to borrow books wherever in East Africa that person happened to live. I took full advantage of this privilege by ordering two books nearly every fortnight while teaching at Kisii, using Janheinz Jahn’s chapter on African literature in his newly published Muntu: An Outline of Neo-African Literature as a shopping guide. So I would have known works  by some of the writers, especially the Nigerians, who were going to be present.

“My inability to join them was particularly disappointing because, due to the reading I had done, I was already starting to look for an American university with an English Department that might be willing to grant me the opportunity to write a doctoral dissertation on this exciting new literature so long as I met all the normal disciplinary requirements in American and British literatures when I resume postgraduate studies the following year, I was lucky that my dream came true. At that time the University of California at Los Angeles was building an ambitious African Studies programme, and the English Department there felt it had enough flexibility to accommodate my interests. And when I emerged with a doctorate in hand in 1969, to my surprise, I found I had no trouble in securing an academic job. I ended up accepting a very generous offer from the University of Texas at Austin, that included time off from teaching in my first year so I could start a research journal on African literatures that would be distributed to institutions and individuals free of charge.

“I am reciting these autobiographical facts to explain how a teaching experience in Africa changed my life and put me in a position to observe trends and tendencies in the emergence of African literature as a robust academic discipline since then.

“When I moved to Texas, the nature of my involvement in African literary studies changed abruptly and almost entirely. I went from the micro world of minute textual analysis of novels in Nigeria—the subject of my dissertation—to the macro world of attempting to engage with all African literatures simultaneously.

“As editor of Research in African Literatures, my job was to welcome sound scholarship on every kind of African literature, oral as well as written, old as well as new, and expressed in whatever language it happened to be produced. This was a very large assignment, but the colleagues who helped me get started were generous with their time and talents, and since the journal was free and was being sent to every African university, it did not take long before we began receiving excellent contributions from scholars based in Africa.”

The author said from that period on, things began to change as far as literature was concerned in Africa, adding that, “To accommodate this rapid rate of proliferation of African literature scholarship, the University of Texas Press decided in 1977 to increase the number of issues of RAL from two to three per year, with each issue ranging from 144 to 166 pages.

“This new arrangement lasted only three years before the journal was turned into a proper quarterly. This growth contrasted with the experience of a number of new literary journals that were starting to spring up in Africa.

“Kole Omotoso once remarked on an Abiku complex in African journal publishing. A promising new literary organ would be born only to die a premature death and then be born again in much the same form. This curse was often the consequence of inadequate funding. Paid subscriptions were not sufficient to keep them alive for any length of time.

“Another sign of the times was the growing number of cultural festivals being hosted not only in Africa, but also internationally. This phenomenon had originated with some force in the 60s and early 70s in such places as London, Dakar, Algeria, and Ile-Ife, but it may have reached its apex in FESTAC in Lagos in 1977 and in Berlin in 1979. Allied to this kind of activity were the many academic conferences on African literature that were held during this period, some of which culminated in the formation of official organisations or societies devoted to promoting the study of African literatures.

“Of the 32 works of Nigerian fiction I examined in my doctoral dissertation covering the years 1952 to 1967, only the four novels of Chinua Achebe have survived as fit subjects for further study. Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard might still retain some interest among scholars as an example of the transition from oral to written storytelling, and Gabriel Okara’s The Voice may yet have some shelf life because of his experimentation with the English language. Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters was not a great novel but it was written by a great writer so it may continue to be examined as a lesser part of his legacy. But no one would be tempted to write a comprehensive history of Nigerian fiction today because there are now just too many Nigerian novelists to include, some of whom are living and working outside Nigeria. And this should be a cause for celebration, not regret.

“In fact, the proliferation of African literature in English in the 21st century is something we should cherish, for there are now more writers producing more works of quality than ever before, and their achievements are being heralded by a new generation of African literature scholars who want to call attention to them.”

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