by Wole Soyinka
Contents
Introduction by Wole Soyinka
Editor’s Note
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Shivering
Monica Arac de Nyeko
The Banana Eater
Rotimi Babatunde
from the forthcoming novel The Tiger of the Mangroves
Eileen Almeida Barbosa
Two Fragments of Love
A. Igoni Barrett
Why Radio DJs are Superstars in Lagos, from Blackass, a novel in progress
Jackee Budesta Batanda
from the forthcoming novel Our Time of Sorrow
Recaredo Silebo Boturu
Alú
Nana Ekua Brew-Hammond
Mama’s Future
Shadreck Chikoti
The Occupant, from the forthcoming novel Azotus, the Kingdom
Edwige-Renée Dro
The Professor
Tope Folarin
New Mom, from a novel in progress
Clifton Gachagua
No Kissing the Dolls Unless Jimi Hendrix is Playing
Stanley Gazemba
Talking Money
Mehul Gohil
Day and Night
Hawa Jande Golakai
The Score, from a novel in progress
Shafinaaz Hassim
The Pink Oysters
Abubakar Adam Ibrahim
Echoes of Mirth
Stanley Onjezani Kenani
The Old Man and the Pub
Ndinda Kioko
Sometime Before Maulidi
Dinaw Mengestu
from the novel All Our Names
Nadifa Mohamed
Number 9
Nthikeng Mohlele
from the forthcoming novel Rusty Bell
Linda Musita
Cinema Demons
Richard Ali A Mutu
an extract from the forthcoming novel Ebamba, Kinshasa-Makambo
Sifiso Mzobe
By the Tracks, from the forthcoming novel Durban December
Glaydah Namukasa
from the forthcoming novel My New Home
Ondjaki
I’m Going to Make Changes to the Kitchen
Okwiri Oduor
Rag Doll
Ukamaka Olisakwe
This is How I Remember It
Chibundu Onuzo
from the forthcoming novel The Wayfarers
Mohamed Yunus Rafiq
Hope’s Hunter
Taiye Selasi
from the novel Ghana Must Go
Namwali Serpell
The Sack
Lola Shoneyin
from the forthcoming novel Harlot
Nii Ayikwei Parkes
from the forthcoming novel ¡Azúcar!
Novuyo Rosa Tshuma
Excerpt from Work in Progress
Chika Unigwe
Soham’s Mulatto, from Mood Indigo, a novel in progress
Zukiswa Wanner
Migrant Labour
Mary Watson
Hiding in Plain Sight
Acknowledgements
Notes on the Authors
Notes on the Translators
Introduction
The Word Shall Fly Free!
1
This year, the world will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The city of Port Harcourt, designated World Book Capital 2014, can justly consider her literary constituency especially privileged to be playing host to the world on the anniversary of a convulsion that profoundly impacted the world of letters and creativity. Not just Port Harcourt of course, but decolonised Africa. For the generation captured in this anthology, the connection may not be obvious. The ‘wind of change’ had already blown over the continent and nearly all African nations had long gained their independence from colonial rule. That wind, however, did not take long to change direction and character. Inevitably it brought with it the detritus – including shrapnel – of ideological warfare from other lands. ‘Inevitably’, since the struggle for independence itself was never completely devoid of a search for ideological anchors. Wherever convenient for the corralling of citizen solidarity and commitment, unity of purpose and obedience to political direction, leadership itself adopted ideological labels, either pitting itself against, or co-opting its writers and intelligentsia into strategies for, social transformation.
For a handful of that leadership, conviction in the social doctrines for radical change was genuine. For the majority, however, it was a sham, a weapon for silencing dissidence and regimenting society. Material development, productive strategies and social organisation were never considered sufficient in themselves as validation of the radical choice. The mind itself was the ultimate target, its conformity and intellectual submission to the prevailing ideology. This made the creative writer a primary objective in the struggle for power. In the Soviet Union and its captive bloc – the birthplace of what, till today, was considered the most radical manifesto of all time – the writer’s creative choices became subject to clinical inspection under the testamentary microscope: theme, language, stylistics, social relationships, class consciousness or the absence thereof, revolutionary rhetoric and so on and on – under which the material of literature itself virtually disappeared, leaving only a question of conformity to, or deviation from, a Party ideology. The African intelligentsia was not slow to catch on, and the battles that raged in academia and among the general literati soon degenerated to a level of ferocity that virtually inhibited new talent altogether. Like the proverbial millipede that stopped to count its feet, they could no longer walk!
For writers and aspiring writers everywhere, Berlin was not simply a wall of concrete with watchtowers and armed guards, bristling with electronic gadgets, mined sectors and slavering guard dogs, but a structure of mind control and creative interdictions. Put at its most basic, under that ideology, the world of literature was neatly bifurcated. There was literature that advanced the revolutionary cause, whose destination was a classless Utopia, and there was – The Rest. During the extreme phases of that division, from the epicentre to the peripheries of its catchment zones, including the African continent, the rest was fit not merely for the garbage dump, it was deemed a crime against social perfectibility, if not against humanity itself.
A quarter of a century after the battle for the mind was resolved in Berlin in favour of freedom of intellect and imagination, a new (yet ancient) enemy of that eternal quest resurfaces on African soil. The vestments of today’s commissariats of ‘correctness’ may have changed, but the credentials remain the same – a doctrinaire mentality that cannot tolerate the freedom of the mind, its exploration of a universe that continues to astonish, to take us on unique voyages of discovery both physical and metaphysical, and even into the hidden, censored and denied histories of ourselves. Was that not what Nelson Mandela had in mind when he rhapsodised: ‘In the presence of Chinua Achebe’ – referring to the writer’s famous work – ‘the prison walls fell down’? Yes, indeed, that is one of the attainments of literature. And not just the walls of Robben Island but of ignorance. Prejudice. Separatism. Mind constrictions. Robben Island could be located in Pyongyang, in Ahidjo’s Cameroon. In Pol Pot’s necropolis. Where are they all? Where will they be found at the dawn of tomorrow? Literature survives them all.
2
One of my favourite browsing grounds remains, unrepentantly, the garbage dump, or, to put it more elegantly – the flea market, especially of books. Those rows and jumbled stalls and trestles of browned, dog-eared second-hand books, pages frayed with age, evocative of contemplative, even escapist hours in the company of unknown faces, redolent of distant places and exotic adventures both of mind and body – such musty, unruly way stops have the edge, for me, even over the fragrance of n
ewly-minted volumes on tidy rows of antiseptic shelves, with careful labelling under subject matter, author, geography etc. You never know what you will find in the flea market! They are spaces of fleeting to deep self-immersions in the unknown, and a purchase does not break your budget. Tantalising extensions of the mind in unscheduled directions, they engender curiosity, and a wistful regret that life does not offer more leisure for infinitely extending such ephemeral moments, those meagre interruptions of routine hustling for material survival or even structured study.
Making a literary discovery becomes a bonus that is casually savoured for days afterwards, hanging in the background of other activities until it dissipates on its own or prods the mind (or hand!) into sometimes unrelated undertakings. Where it takes on a life of its own, or simply inducts the mind into new regions of awareness, is, however, the most rewarding. Blessed be those who can swear that they never touch a book unless it promises class conflict and pays homage to dialectical materialism – the rest of us infidels look forward to being surprised by an exquisite literary vignette from a hitherto unknown hand, a work that has emerged through reinterpretative intelligence over humdrum existence, the transformation of the familiar through a new order of reality, the creation of an autonomous realm of social relations and extraction of congruence from incongruence etc. etc. The writer is a magician. Here now are three quite recent literary adventures, each exposing this secret fraternity within the world of books.
Take one of my nominations for this very Africa39 project. It came from one such encounter in a ‘garbage’ pile. I have no idea, even at the stage of writing this, if the product of that encounter will make the longlist, the short, or eventually earn a place in this anthology – or indeed if others have entered the same choice. All I know is that the modest volume of short stories had me making enquiries and keeping a lookout for further works from that pen. I encountered it in a sort of Fringe Mart, in this very city, outside the confines of a previous book festival in Port Harcourt organised by the Rainbow Book Club. It was a work of acute social observation and creative empathy – the author was clearly no beginner. His collection did not spout any ideological sermons, being committed only to exposing the social fakeries and artificial values of contemporary society, delineating the delicate, and often moving, course of adolescence in a mined environment. It did not take more than the flash of one line and I knew that I held a miniature gem in my hands. I was not deceived.
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 I
diot, 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!