OF PRIZES AND LITERARY GIANTS 
so close on the heels of the Clarence 
Thomas-Anita Hill sexual harassment 
fiasco, it brought a most welcome balm 
to our wounded psyche by confirming - 
for all who cared to listen - the need to 
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into a venerable beauty toasted at 
cocktail parties from Dodan Barracks 
to Buckingham Palace. Now five full 
years later, another African has won a 
prestigious prize and the same 'focusrecognition-
map' drums are loud in the 
streets. 
shift attention from the myth between 
the B lack person's thighs to the repressed 
genius between his/her ears. 
And for Okri as a person and a writer, 
the award is an invaluable oasis on a 
long and famished road, a most-needed 
- and most deserved - reward for an 
author's single-minded, rigorous, and 
almost demonic dedication to the 
promise of the pen. Of course, I have 
always had problems with the 
melodramatic, sometimes scatological 
figurations in aspects of Okri's narrative, 
especially theirpessimistic evisceration 
of the Nigerian landscape; but I am also 
forcibly struck by Okri's irrepressibly 
humane impulse, his angry, even 
pugnacious consciousness - at war with 
evil, at war with those who make the 
world too large or too small. No one can 
miss the tough intellectual energy in an 
NIYIOSUNDARE 
So, glad I was when news came of 
Okri's triumph. But I was also scared 
that soon, very soon, focus would shift 
form the novel that won the award to a 
specious archaeology of African writing. 
I knew literary statisticians would go to 
work, with a running spectacle of firsts: 
'the first Nigerian novelist to...,' 'the 
first African novel to...,' 'the first African 
to....', etc. I knew literary speculators 
would go to town with brave projections 
of the inestimable 'focus' the prize 
would confer on African literature, the 
much-needed'attention'it wouldendow 
African writing with, the abundant 
'recognition' that African letters would 
reap from it.... 
My fears emanated from a personal 
experience. Upon co-winning the 
Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1986,-I 
was flattered, then infuriated by 
commentators who kept congratulating 
me on putting Nigerian, nay African 
literature, 'on the map.' Remember this 
was the year the inimitable Wole 
Soyinka captured the father of all literary 
The questions that keep coming to my 
mind are: whose 'recognition'? Which 
cartographer drew this 'map' in a way 
that Africa has to struggle for a place on 
it? When did literary prizes become an 
entire continent's entry condition to the 
artistic patrimony of the world? 
In a curious but logical way, the focusattention-
recognition shibboleth is 
offspring of a deep-seated exofugal 
anxiety that is itself an offshoot of the 
centre-margin dichotomy that 
characterises Africa's relationship with 
the outside world. By the logic of this 
anxiety, Europe and the United States 
form the centre of the world; Africa and 
other 'Third World' countries are 
consigned to the margin. And, naturally,
the margin is that proverbial abode of 
the wretched of the earth, the roost of 
chaotic silence where nothing has a life 
of its own, by its own, without an 
enabling nod from outside. On the other 
hand, the centre, occupied as of right by 
powerful nations, is a model held up to 
the world, a place where everything 
happens, confirmer of value, even 
credibility, the ultimate arbiter of literary 
and aesthetic taste. 
The pull in all directions, all respects, is 
therefore towards the centre. And this 
situation has generated an intriguing 
irony: to be fully appreciated at home, 
many African writers have to seek 
'recognition' abroad. If a foreign critic 
decides that an African writer is good or 
bad, who is the home-grown critic to 
say it is otherwise? Who will hear his/ 
her voice? The margin is the centre of 
silence. It swallows up the voice, 
complete with its echoes. The town 
crier's cadence is muted in dreary mists. 
Only ventriloquists of foreign gods are 
left in the streets. 
The centre calls the shots, moderates 
the debate (which very often sidles from 
dialogue to monologue), apportions 
speaking (and hearing) right, dictates 
voice modulation, determines who is to 
be heard or hushed. The centre is where 
'best-sellers' are born and bred. Which 
is why not a few writers would do 
anything, any thing, to get reviewed - or 
simply mentioned - in The Times, either 
of London or New York, but hardly of 
New Delhi or Lagos. As the Nigerian 
writer Kole Omotoso once remarked, to 
be worth real attention at home today, 
the African writer must have imported 
'recognition' from abroad. Only few 
sympathetic newspapers would risk 
wasting their increasingly scarce 
resources on what in Nigeria is derisively 
called a 'local champion.' 
African universities, those citadels of 
marginal silence, have done everything 
to advance this exogenous pathology. 
Until recently, books and articles 
'published abroad' weighed heavier in 
ravlaw 
Just consider tins: apart 
from ifot omnibus 9igma 
ftwandufocfi fats come to 
6e tfttvugfi tfaegenerousity 
and vision, of a Japanese 
puSSsfier, them was no 
single continental'literary 
prize of substantial Worth 
inSifrka. 
the consideration for promotion. It was 
(is) more rewarding, more civilised, to 
do a study ofBenJohnsonthanof Wole 
Soyinka; to explicate the terminal 'e' in 
pre-Chaucerian English than carry out 
an an analysis of Sierra Leonean krio or 
Nigerian pidgin. Just as our economists 
keep telling us to produce what can be 
sold in Europe, what can bring in the 
sorely needed foreign exchange, even 
at the expense of domestic wealth and 
subsistence, our writers arc being urged 
to put their pen where their fame is, to 
write themselves out of marginal 
obscurity. 
In a strange way, the margin fosters its 
own narcissism, its own hysterical 
craving for an image, not in its own 
mirror (the margin does not have its 
own mirror), but in that of the centre. 
The projection therein is usually not 
that of the self, but of the self as defined 
and determined by the other. And the 
centre that manufactures all these 
mirrors recognises its own replications, 
its own marginal copies. The gods can 
spot their own voice even in the darkest 
recesses of the ventriloquist's throat. 
At work in the 'recognition' anxiety is 
a curious complementary 
consciousness. On the one hand is a 
mindset of the centre that grants highpriced 
recognition to those African 
works which conform to and reinforce 
that traditional Euro-American opinion 
about Africa. 
In this regard, some Western critics 
actually believe that their attention, their 
patronage, is enough to win instant 
'recognition' for an African work. And, 
what's more, that it is their inalienable 
right to bestow such recognition. 
This attitude is enhanced and 
perpetuated by the mentality of the 
margin that no work can be deemed 
accomplished until it has been judged 
so by the centre. After all, all the canons, 
whether in creative writing or literary 
theory, have always originated from 
centres outside Africa. And when these 
canons boom, the margin scurries about 
like chickens, picking up fall-outs, 
basking in the hand-me-down vibrations 
of expiring idioms. Which is why in the 
prevailing discourse of the world today, 
the centre inaugurates the voice, the 
margin scrambles for the echoes. 
This unequal discourse is heir to nonliterary 
antecedents. Shake out the 
drawers of history, and you will discover 
that Africa has never played the namegiver 
in international affairs; on the 
contrary, she has always been the named. 
The Niger didn't exist unti I Mungo Park 
'discovered' it; Kinshasa was not there 
until it acquired the name of Belgium's 
Leopold; that magnificent lake between 
Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania was a 
mute, indeterminate body of water until 
it was 'discovered' by Speke, 'explored' 
by Stanley, then named for Queen 
Victoria. Go through the length and 
breadth of this wonderful world, you 
will find no continent that has 
surrendered so much to foreign Adams. 
But why will outsiders not be in a 
position to judge/or us on what is good 
or bad about our literature? Why should 
we not die to gain their attention, win 
their recognition?Hasn'tWilliamBlake, 
55
that fecundly revolutionary English poet 
warned that those who do not/cannot 
create their own system must be prepared 
to be enslaved by the system of others? 
Africa is not only a continent in the 
margin, but by every indication she 
appears inexorably, so fatally pleased 
to be there. 
Just consider this: apart from the 
omnibus Noma Award which has come 
to be through the generosity and vision 
of a Japanese publisher, there was no 
single continental literary prize of 
substantial worth in Africa. This crucial 
lack must be laid at the door of a monster 
other than our perennial poverty. Or 
does one plead poverty in this regard in 
a continent where one country 
sometimes squanders several million 
dollars on hosting of a continental 
conference, a continent where a sittight 
dictator is so scandalously rich 
that he has been described 'walking 
bank account in leopard skin hat?' No, 
Africa's failure to institute her own 
literary prizes was due to monumental 
lack of vision by African rulers, their 
proverbial hostility to images and ideas 
of beauty, their rank philistinism, their 
eternal satisfaction at being'movers and 
shakers' of the margin. No, the African 
strongman would rather build a prison 
for the writer than establish a prize for 
his/her artistic accomplishment. 
A Celebration of West African Writing TAI ADE FATO 
Literatur 
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recent years. be a futile effort. Oral literature has 
always been a part of the people. This 
art form had reached a very high level 
before the art of writing ever came here. 
What about the dance drama, the famous 
griots among the Senegalese and several 
others. 
It is not surprising then that the British 
Council organizers of the West African 
Writers Exhibition had to state that the 
exhibition covers only written literature 
in English language and those whose 
brochure preface written by Dr. Stewart 
Brown of the Centre of West African 
Studies, University of Birmingham 
describes as 'One of the frustrations of 
the present exhibition.' 
He also acknowledges the lack of 
adequate representation of drama in the 
exhibition despite its being 'the most 
vibrant, the most fertile, arguably the 
most effective medium of West African 
literature in English over the last forty 
years.' But that is drama in performance 
Nevertheless here is an impressive 
collection ranging from Olaudah 
Equiano's work first published in 1789 
through Negritude and other colonial 
era writings to the recent magic-realism 
writings in the novel, short story, poetry 
and drama genres as well as critical 
works and essays. The works cover a 
wide range of writers as well as well as 
publishers. IGRI 
r»vl*w 
But let us go back to our argument about 
foreign 'recognition' and the exogenous 
determination of the value of African 
literature and art. There are many reasons 
why we should not blame Africans who 
thank their prize-winning compatriots 
for bringing 'recognition' to the 
continent. Africa has remained for many 
centuries a victim of negation and 
absence. The accomplished writer from. 
Africa is, therefore, regarded not just as 
a voice, but also as an antidote, a veritable 
medal to be waved in the face of a 
humiliating and relentlessly cynical 
world, a proof that we too have not 
come to the gathering of the world with 
empty hands. The book was a powerful 
instrument in the oppression and 
exploitation of the African; the book is 
also seen by many Africans today as a 
weapon of liberation. So whether they 
accept that mantle or not, modern 
African writers are regarded as warriors, 
the literary messiahs of a silenced and 
much-abused tribe. 
To be sure and fair, foreign prizes and 
their attendant recognition have playeda 
valuable diplomatic role in the lives 
and struggles of African literary 
ambassadors. But for pressures and 
outcry consequent upon their 
recognition abroad, Soyinka, Ngugi, 
Nawal el Saadawi, Abdilatiff Laabi, 
Micere Mugo, Jack Mapanje, and many 
others would probably not have come 
out alive from the dungeons of African 
strongmen. The 1988 Commonwealth 
Fiction Prize came as an invigorating 
poetic justice to Festus Iyayi, a fine 
Nigerian novel ist and leader of Nigeria's 
Academic Staff Union of Universities 
(ASUU), who flew to London for the 
prize only a few days after emerging 
from a prolonged and gruesome 
detention without charge, without trial. 
So this essay is by no means another 
vulgar attack on foreign prizes and 
awards. It has nothing against 
recognition provided it is healthy, 
genuine, and unpatronizing. The thrust 
of its argument is that there is something 
essentially universal about the genius of 
human creativity, no matter what its 
provenance. No part of the world has a 
right to lay a monopolistic claim to that 
genius, and proceed to lay out parameters 
any yardsticks for the artistic estate of 
other places. The world is a wide, 
miraculous mbari to which every people 
bring their own creation. Let no one 
play master in that gathering. Let no one 
accept to play servant. Let no canons 
terrorise talents with arrogant booming. 
Above all, Africa needs to discover her 
own name without making other 
continents anonymous; she needs to find 
her own centre without marginalising 
other parts of the world. IGRI
56