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In just over a week after Chimamanda Adichie’s
triumph at the Orange Broadband Prize, winning the £30,000
prize money, Chinua Achebe, the writer she considers her great inspiration,
has demonstrated again his superior vintage quality by walking into
the Adichie party with the MAN Booker International Literature Prize,
its trophy and £60,000 prize money. Now there is double celebration
in African Literature. The daughter wins, and the father also wins!
It is possible to equally celebrate both prize wins because between
Achebe and Adichie, between the old and the new, there is mutual
admiration and professional support. There is a sense of continuity.
At  , we have been thrilled
by this auspicious turn of events and have decided to doubly celebrate
the double win by offering these pages to a unique photo survey
of those who, like Chimamanda Adichie, may be considered the latest
inheritors of the Achebe legacy, the new torch-bearers for African
literature.
The year 2008 will also be significant in African
literature as the fiftieth year of the publication of Chinua Achebe’s
Things Fall Apart, still considered by many as the definitive novel
of the African (postcolonial) experience, certainly a universally
acknowledged pioneering classic on the subject. This was an important
reason given for awarding Achebe his Man Booker International Literature
Prize. At publication Things Fall Apart, which the author began
to write fifty years ago in 1957, became the most inspirational
novel of the modern era in African literature, and Achebe a leading
indigenous interpreter of this nearly new literary enterprise and
the cultural landscapes which provided its material. But Achebe
was not a lone voice. There were other significant literary interpreters
at that time, some even before Achebe and just as influential, who
began to tell the stories and truth of Africa in their informed
African voices, in their stories, poems and many plays – writers
like his fellow Nigerians Wole Soyinka and Christopher Okigbo, the
Ghanaians, Ayi Kwei Armah and Kofi Awoonor, Cameroonians Ferdinand
Oyono and Mongo Beti, Ugandan Okot p’Bitek, the Senegalese
Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Leopold Senghor and Sembene Ousmane, the Egyptian
Naguib Mahfouz, the Somalian Nuruddin Farah, the Kenyan Ngugi wa
Thiong’o and the South Africans Eskia Mphalele, Athol Fugard
and Dennis Brutus. And there were women among them too, including
Efua Sutherland, Zulu Sofola, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Nawal
el Sadaawi, Ama Ata Aidoo and Buchi Emecheta. Among their critics
and theorists were Eldred Durosimi Jones, Ato Quayson, Emmanuel
Obiechina, Abiola Irele, Isidore Okpewho, Michael Echeruo, Chinweizu,
Ali Mazrui, Molara Ogundipe-Leslie and Kwame Appiah.
Writing in Africa, or even the literature of Africa,
did not begin with them, but they were pioneers in successfully
blending and employing the idioms of Africa’s colonial experience
in their work and in the necessary write-back to the colonizing
nations, part of the coming-of-age ownership of the African story,
and equalization of the discourse, at independence and soon after.
However, this was not the only theme of the writers. Among especially
the South Africans there was the tendency to explore bi-racial tensions,
and the vagaries of personal and corporate damage in the life of
Africa, the Africa of their time. Much has happened in African literature
since then, and other major literary voices have risen in the continent
to consolidate and progress the work of those pioneering writers.
Such more recent writers as Femi Osofisan, Odia Ofeimun, Jack Mapanje,
Syl Chenney Coker, Niyi Osundare, Njabulo Ndebele, Simon Gikandi
and Kofi Anyidoho, writing after the Achebe generation, have themselves
become part of the canon of African literature. But most of the
subjects of this African Writing gallery display or photo survey
are comparatively still newer to the African cultural landscape.
They are the latest stars of the African literary firmament, part
of what the poet Christopher Okigbo perceptively identified as a
starry “going and coming that goes on forever…”
Those we consider here were very young children or not even born
at the time, in the 1950s and 1960s, when Achebe and others began
to publish their epoch-making work. There is no exact or fail-safe
science by which we have chosen those represented here. They are
merely our informed selection. Part of our great joy in this celebration
of progress in African literature is the fact we already know that
on the basis of good writing alone there are enough other excellent
writers to make our list many times over, especially from significant
African literary nations like South Africa and Nigeria.
At ,
we asked ourselves: Are there any contemporary or recent voices
in African literature today, half a century after Things Fall Apart,
about whom we could be justly proud as we have been with Achebe
and others, writers on whom we can depend to faithfully and excellently
interpret the new concerns and experiences of being or living in
contemporary Africa? Below are some of the faces and names we found.
These are the contemporary African griots, the inheritors and latest
interpreters of the proud cultural but blighted political experience
post independence Africa has been. Their peculiarly alienating experience
of recent African history has made them the first generation of
African writers to live and write mostly outside Africa, in many
cases with dual nationality, or with multiple national loyalties,
sympathies or influences, and sometimes even without the rooted
familiarity with Africa earlier generations of African writers took
for granted. These are the writers of a disillusioned Africanist
enterprise, who are not naïve about international realities
but have become more hesitant about blaming outsiders because they
have experienced a lot of enemies within. They are often less ideological
in their judgements and creative choices than their predecessors.
They are a motley crowd, some already established as international
literary figures, with extensive bibliographies, but still comparatively
less known to and celebrated by the canon of African literature,
and others better known in their nations or known as much by their
writing as by their roles as critics and facilitators to the literary
process.
We started off this survey intent on featuring
only the most accomplished of the writers, no matter who they were
or where they came from. But the achievement of Achebe’s Things
Fall Apart is an All-Africa achievement so we realized that as much
as our primary interest in excellence would allow it was necessary
to cast our net further and include others from as many possible
places who may be at the beginning of their careers but already
demonstrate the same native ambition and sensitivity to craft, the
same confidence in their African abilities that made Things fall
Apart possible. Thrown together with those who began publishing
their work in the 1980s are the younger but no less important writers
who are debutantes of the new century. There are three decades of
writing represented here, and also three decades in the age range
(from the twenties to the forties). We have excluded writers born
before 1960 (because of the epochal relevance of 1960 as a central
year for new beginnings in African political history, especially
regarding independence from colonial rule). However, this is more
than a mere generational statement. It is concerned with engaging
the promising work of the most recent literary inheritors of Achebe’s
achievement in Things Fall Apart, who significantly operate in a
critical terrain and creative environment somewhat different from
that associated with the best-known work of the older canonical
generations. We are here considering such comparatively recent African
writers who may be considered the future of African literature.
Those represented here are the writers of the internet age, the
age of theory, globalization, exile and its fractured identities.
This is the first corpus of African writing to be substantially
distanced from Africa by geography and by many psychological and
theoretical removes, the first to substantially dialogue with the
homeland from these many distances. This is ’s
50, presented here without prejudice and in no preferred order.
But there are many interesting others we also found in our search
not included here… continues
to The List
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The
African Writer's Fund
The Travel Commissar |
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