Nadine Gordimer - Telling Times - Writing and Living, 1950-2008

Does Thabo Mbeki’s renaissance sound like a renaissance of negritude?

I don’t believe it is. Or could be. Circumstances in our countries have changed so fundamentally since that concept of the 1950s, when liberation was still to be won. The reality of African history has long begun to be recorded and established, from where it was cut off as anthropology and prehistory and substituted by the history of foreign conquest and settlers. One of the dictionary definitions of the wide meanings of renaissance is ‘any revival in art and literature’; as we writers take to ourselves the right to vary or add to the meaning of words, I would interpret the meaning of renaissance in Mbeki’s context not as reviving the past, whether pre-colonial or of the negritude era, but of using it only as a basis for cultural self-realisation and development in an Africa that never existed before , because it is an Africa that has come through : emerged from the experience of slavery, colonial oppression, the humiliating exploitation of paternalism, economic and spiritual degradation, suffering of every nature human evil could devise. A continent that has liberated itself; overcome.

Africans have established, beyond question, that our continent is not part of anyone’s erstwhile empire. Secure in this confidence, and open-eyed at home as I hope we shall be to the necessity to apply ourselves to developing Africa’s literary variety to and fro across our own Pan-African frontiers, it’s time to cross new frontiers on our cultural horizon, to turn the literary compass to measure whether we still should be pointing in the same direction towards the outside world.

Which world? Whose world? The North — South axis was the one on which we were regarded so long only as on the receiving end, and which, latterly, we have somewhat culturally reversed: African writers have won prestigious literary prizes in England and France, and even Nobel prizes; African music has become popular abroad, the international fashion industry presently has a vogue for somewhat bizarre adaptations of African traditional dress — well, Africa dressed itself up in Europe’s three-piece suits, collar and tie; now Europe wraps itself in a pagne, a dashiki, a bou-bou …

Of course we do, and should, retain our freedom of access to, appropriation of, European and North American literary culture. I believe we have passed the stage, in the majority of our countries, of finding Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Voltaire and Melville, irrelevant. I believe that, as writers and readers, all literature of whatever origin belongs to us. There is an acceptable ‘world literature’ in this sense; one great library to which it would be a folly of self-deprivation to throw away our membership cards.

What has happened is that the works of our own writers, imparting the ethos of our peoples, have firmly and rightfully displaced those of Europeans as the definitive cultural texts in our schools and universities.

But if you place the compass on a map you will see not alone that South — South and not North — South is our closer orientation, but that if you cut out the shape of South America and that of Africa you can fit the east coast of South America and the west coast of Africa together, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle making a whole — the lost continent Gondwana, sundered by cosmic cataclysms and seas.

This romantic geographical connection is merely symbolic of the actual, potential relationships that lay dormant and ignored during the colonial period when our continent of Africa was set by European powers strictly on the North — South axis. Climate and terrain are primary experiences for human beings; many South American and African countries share the same kind of basic natural environment, which determines not only the types of food they grow and eat, but the myths they created, and the nature of city life they have evolved. Both continents were conquered by European powers, their culture overrun and denigrated. Both have won their freedom from foreign powers through suffering, and suffered subsequently under brutal dictators in internecine wars among their own people. Both bear a burden of their people’s poverty and confront neo-colonialism exacted in return for their need of economic aid. Finally, there is the strange reciprocal bond: with those communities in South America descended from slaves brought from Africa.

All this in common, and yet we know so little of South American writers’ work and life. Aside from some few big names, such as Borges of Argentina, Machado de Assis of Brazil, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, and now Gabriel García Márquez of Colombia, we do not know the work of the majority of South American writers, with whom, in many ways, we have more existential ties than with writers in Europe and North America.

Industrialists and entrepreneurs are opening up their South — South routes of trade, matching the exchange of raw materials, processing and expertise which countries in South America and Africa can supply for one another. They are giving more than a side-glance away from the fixed gaze of North — South development. Earlier this year Mongane Wally Serote and I visited Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, and there met writers from other South American countries, as well. All were eager to grow closer to their recognition that our literatures are reciprocal in the ethos of our many shared existential situations, from the colonised past to the development problems of the present, both material and cultural. If the industrialists and entrepreneurs are paying attention to the material reciprocity, why are we, as writers, not looking South — South in a new freedom to choose which world, whose world, beyond our own with which we could create a wider one for ourselves?

In our first concern, which is to develop an African ‘world literature’ as our status, we should keep well in mind the words of the great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz. 81With the exceptions of the pre-Hispanic civilisations of America, he writes, all civilisations — including China and Japan — have been the result of intersections and clashes with foreign cultures. And the Congolais writer, Henri Lopez, 82in his novel, Le Lys et le Flamboyant , is speaking not only of the mixed blood of tribe, race and colour of many of our people in Africa, but of the interchange of ideas, of solutions to a common existence, when he writes, ‘Every civilisation is born of a forgotten mixture, every race is a variety of mixtures that is ignored.’ The nurture of our writers, our literature, is a priority which should not create for us a closed-shop African ‘world literature’, a cultural exclusivity in place of the exclusion, even post-colonial, that has kept us in an ante-room of self-styled ‘world literatures’. Let our chosen status in the world be that of writers who seek exchanges of the creative imagination, ways of thinking and writing, of fulfilling the role of repository of the people’s ethos, by opening it out, bringing to it a vital mixture of individuals and peoples recreating themselves.

Finally, at home in Africa, in the countries of our continent, let Rosa Luxemburg’s definition be at the tip of our ballpoint pens and on the screens of our word processors as we write: ‘Freedom means freedom to those who think differently.’ Let the writer’s status be recognised as both praise-singer and social critic. Let us say with Amu Djoleto: 83

What you expect me to sing, I will not,

What you do not expect me to croak, I will.

1997

These are the poles of perception between which we meet today. These are the oppositions of the phenomenon of want.

The first is ancient, an implied acceptance of a destined lot, everyone conditioned by class (each in his place); by religion (the meek shall inherit the earth) to be content to have no place and inherit nothing.