Africa39 (2 page)

The second took place in a mall in Dakar, but the subject was located in Cameroon under the late President Ahmadou Ahidjo, the action set in a concentration camp for dissidents. Political repression was common knowledge, but a full-scale concentration camp? There is propaganda and there is reality. And there is of course reality that suffers from failure of communication – in short, fails the test of literary conviction. This personal narrative, very simply written, no stylistic pyrotechnics, carried the stamp of authentic experience – victim or simply witness. I purchased a copy. Despite having had close Cameroonian colleagues since the early sixties, and having heard their outcry at the time of those events, it was only with this work that I became individually inducted into the day-to-day existence of dissident victims in such camps, and in vivid detail. There is a difference between clinical reportage on the one hand, and, on the other, admission as a vicarious witness to the functioning of the mechanisms of repression – including even its bureaucracy – that is the triumph of literature.

This Cameroonian dissident had spent nearly a decade in a detention camp instituted by my next-door dictator, Ahmadou Ahidjo, a camp whose existence had of course been stoutly denied by the government. Overcoming personal suffering and privation, this author provides an intimate lesson on the loss of liberty and its bureaucratic banalities. The book did not presume to analyse the colonial and neo-capitalist social structures, the
rentier
and
comprador
economics of neo-colonial surrogate leaders etc. etc. that had made his ten-year odyssey inevitable in the first place. No, he had merely taken time off to situate the reader in the physical atmosphere of his detention camps, including the contrasting strategies of survival as he was transferred to farm labour from the sterile walls of an actual prison. In short, a work fit for only garbage for its deficiency in progressive socio-economic analysis. Still, it rests snugly today on my shelf side by side with other shamelessly undialectical narratives of human resilience and survival of the spirit, and the writer’s overwhelming compulsion to simply – testify!

In a class of its own for irredeemable apostasy would be my third exemplar of these Chance Encounters of a Different Kind – a semi-fictional narrative that drew deeply on the mythology of a part of the Nigerian landscape. This time, the terrain of discovery could not have been more contrasted – a fleeting escape into my own world that took place on the freezing streets of Geneva. Walking between the trestles of the usual potpourri of books from everywhere, my eye caught the single word that was its title – a Nigerian place-name. The result was predictable. I stopped, opened the volume and sighed with disappointment. The book was in French and my French – to put it kindly – is somewhat limited. It was doubly aggravating, since that very place-name was none other than – Onitsha!

This Eastern Nigerian city has earned literary fame as being, if not exactly the pioneer of the flea-market publication – mostly pamphlet format – that came to be known as Onitsha Market literature, then at least of being a promoter of an industry of such rudimentary writing, expressing not only the social aspirations of the authors’ society, the confusions of cultural transition and mixed values, but also the robust political awakening reflected through the lives and travails of pan-African heroes: Patrice Lumumba, Jomo Kenyatta, Marcus Garvey and other iconic figures. A treasure trove, perhaps more for the social anthropologist than the mainstream literary critic, its products would appeal more to an unsophisticated proletariat/peasant readership than to those who are featured in this anthology.

I was about to abandon the volume when my rudimentary French netted a sentence that arrested my motion. I struggled through that paragraph, then the entire page, then recollected as my fingers began to freeze that I had a fat
Harrap’s
French dictionary at home in Abeokuta. So of course, I bought
Onitsha,
brought it back to its approximate environment, but continued to postpone the gratification of my curiosity for several months. The author was again one I had never encountered.

That same year, the designation of the Nobel Prize for Literature was announced. I dashed to my bookshelf and, yes, there it was – Le Clézio! Pure serendipity. I had nothing to do with Le Clézio’s nomination, and in any case, Nobel’s literary Academy does not work that way. That way, however, is simply the way, the excitement of Literature, sometimes dominated by the random spirit of
Esu
, lord of the crossroads, other times by the methodical application of
Orunmila
, the presiding deity of the divination board,
Ifa.
A blasphemous suggestion undoubtedly to the ‘radical order’ since, in addition to the fact that Le Clézio’s novel explores the mythology of his host environment at childhood, and in a spirit of discovery, I have now attributed – albeit playfully – my encounter with his work to the intervention of obscurantist enemies of a materialist understanding of market forces and the law of supply and demand etc. etc.

Le Clézio and I eventually interacted in the flesh in South Korea, at a literary encounter, where I watched his bemused expression as the pros and cons of literary ideologies were traded. It was sufficiently sobering to share on that occasion the stark face of the world’s largest and most thorough surviving Personality Cult that holds millions captive, as our colleagues from North Korea narrated their experiences and their strategies for creative fulfilment and physical survival. They had borne and finally escaped the operations of the totalitarian state that had no space for the creative estate, except, undoubtedly to dub its products garbage manifestations of deviant thinking. North Korea, where even a moronic leader, once spawned into a dynasty, can be elevated to the status of Supreme Guide and Infallible Idiot, stands virtually alone today as the structured edifice of human regimentation at its grimmest. The foundations of a ‘modern’ nation are the millions and millions of her crushed humanity – largely her intellectuals, writers, teachers and others who labour in the ‘vineyard of the Word’. What ‘consciousness’ shall we attribute to such deadly manifestations, I often wonder, we who so readily resort to phrase-mongering as quicklime over the fallen victims of the rhetorical order?

I try to imagine an attempted dialogue between the architects of the Berlin Wall and the current standard bearers of theocratic closures. What a vengeful irony these no-prisoner-taken ‘revolutionary’ brigades of the spiritual realm have wreaked, and continue to wreak, on writers and critics alike, not forgetting practitioners in the sister arts – music, theatre, cinema etc. A theocratic actuality, a virulent strain of Islam, now swears to wipe out in entirety, and with murderous abandon, all other structures of consciousness. At the head of the receiving end of this onslaught stands – as usual – the written word, and all its associated institutions. It is against this very background, a raging homicidal actuality launched by the gatekeepers of One Consciousness that critics – more accurately, censors – attempt to reimpose ideological diktats
on African writers, diktats
that lie today under the rubble of the Berlin wall. It is against this background that the last-ditch ideologues continue to demand of writers that it is insufficient to denounce atrocities, to allegorise the unspeakable, to ridicule the perverse and puncture afflatus, and even to imagine the infinite – no, they must first explain the cause of localised and global dilemma through ideological prisms and tidy formulations of social development, as
is
, as
used to be
and as
should be
!

Africa39
is dedicated to an age group that occupies a significant phase, arguably considered a defining plateau before a fully confident ascent towards the peak of imaginative powers. Its fortuitous timing in this instance, with a universal celebration of the release of creative plurality, augurs well for the future, yet it is fraught with danger from an implacable enemy – a religious fundamentalist onslaught on human freedom. Emerging from the shadow of the Berlin Wall was no easy task for many African writers of that age who, in contesting colonialism and then confronting internal social malformations through their writing, seeking new forms and playing variations on the old, literally fought with one arm tied behind their back, or willingly underwent a version of critical lobotomy from the scalpel of doctrine at the most productive phase of their career. Some eventually recovered; others never! Much talent was suppressed, bullied and harried during that period of doctrinal obsession. It was a crime against literature, art and creativity. Restraint on that faculty we recognise as human imagination leads inevitably to raging crimes against humanity itself – a sequence that is amply, repetitively demonstrated throughout the history of the world: first a crime against creativity, next, crimes against humanity. It is a hard lesson learnt – it is not possible to be against creativity and hope to end up on the side of humanity. That attestation is tragically enshrined in the nation’s latest contribution to world vocabulary – Boko Haram – and its transborder, power-driven conspiracies against the creative mandate.

The primary function of literature is to capture and expand reality. It is futile therefore to attempt to circumscribe African creative territory, least of all by conformism to any literary ideology that then aspires to be the tail that wags the dog. Literature derives from, reflects and reflects upon – Life. It projects its enhanced vision of Life’s potential, its possibilities, narrates its triumphs and failures. Its offerings include empowerment of the oppressed and the subjugation of power. It will not attempt to do all of this at once – that will only clot up the very passages of its own proceeding. There is infinitude to the nature of Literature, but attempts to curtail or dictate to its protean propositions often strike me as a simultaneous exercise in attempted parricide and infanticide in one stroke. There is only one universal literary ideology that answers human cruelties, the excesses of power, bigotries, social inequalities and alienation: Literature
.
On behalf of a pursuit that lures generation after generation to partake of its sumptuous banquet of creative splendours – Welcome,
Africa39
!

Wole Soyinka

Lagos, May 2014

Editor's Note

 

When we reject the single story, when we realise that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise
.

– Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

 

 

The writers featured in this anthology were chosen following intensive research by Binyavanga Wainaina, writer and founder of one of the continent's most inspiring literary journals,
Kwani?
. Following a public call out for recommendations and the work of judges Elechi Amadi, Margaret Busby and Osonye Onwueme – who had the difficult task of selecting just thirty-nine writers out of this pool of outstanding talent –
Africa39
is a celebration of writers whose work promises to inspire readers for decades to come.

In the months it has taken to bring the collection together, I have found myself immersed in texts by and conversations with some writers whose works I already knew well; others I had heard of but not yet read; and a few who were entirely new discoveries. As a reader, my horizon is broadened especially by the inclusion of works in translation from Equatorial Guinea and Cape Verde. It is my fervent hope that the stories chosen to appear here will give readers that same gift – the satisfaction of new work by familiar, beloved voices, the joy of discovering the new.

Although thirty-nine writers, representing sixteen countries from south of the Sahara, can only provide a snapshot of the potential offerings from a vast continent of storytellers, this anthology is a good place to start. There are love stories here; explorations in language that seek to bridge the gap between poetry and prose; political works of psychedelic daring; a look at the far future that comments on social repression today; re-imaginings of historical events; explorations in crime writing. There is no danger of ‘a single story' here. Indeed, one would be hard pressed to find collective concerns, unifying themes or even to coin a definition that adequately describes the range, stylistic inclinations and subjects herein. At their best, the writers of
Africa39
show themselves a generation whose imaginations are unbound – time, space and circumstance are adapted, adopted and shaped in stories that are as different from each other as their creators are unique.

 

Ellah Wakatama Allfrey

London, May 2014

The Shivering

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

On the day a plane crashed in Nigeria, the same day the Nigerian first lady died, somebody knocked loudly on Ukamaka’s door in Princeton. The knock surprised her because nobody ever came to her door unannounced; and it made her jumpy because since first-thing that morning she had been on the Internet reading Nigerian news, refreshing pages too often. She had minimised early pictures from the crash site. Each time she looked at them, she brightened her laptop screen, peering at what the news articles called ‘wreckage’, a blackened hulk with whitish bits scattered all about it like torn paper, an indifferent lump of char that had once been a plane filled with people.