Niyi Osundare and other African writers in Japan 
~W—EDITOR'S NOTE 1 spoke with the 
M J poet, Niyi Osundare the other 
M T week. It was shortly after a re 
Jm—^M turn from Japan where he participated 
in an African Writer's Forum. The 
Forum was initiated and sponsored jointly 
by the Japanese Foreign Ministry, the 
Kodansha Limited of Japan and Africa Society 
of Japan. The purpose, we gathered, was 
for the purpose of deepening mutual understanding 
between the peoples of Japan and 
African countries, in view of the necessity of 
increased co-operation in the international 
community, for its peace and prosperity.' 
Also in attendance were other African writers 
like Micere Mugo of Kenya, Ndebele 
Njabulo(now Vice Chancellor, University of 
the North. South Africa), Kole Omotoso of 
Nigeria and Paul Zelesa of Malawi. The 
forum had the theme, 'What are the problems 
the African Countries face in terms of its 
social and economic development, when those 
are seen through the African writers' eyes ?' 
I then asked, What did you see, what did you 
feel, what did you touch and smell? Which 
was a conscious departure from what should 
have been the more predictable question. 
'What did you say?' at the forum. Each 
prospect - of an interview resulting from the 
encounters, or an outright travelogue - looked 
rather attractive for our own purpose. But 
then, we bent towards the travelogue and 
agreed on a deadline, which departmental 
and other literary commitments prevented 
him from keeping. Then came a wild idea and 
tasked: 'Didyou scribble any lines of poetry, 
I mean which record images or capture your 
impressions of that world?' And of course he 
had. Poetry lines ordered in stanzas of four 
lines each (he told me they were deliberately 
patterned after a haiku, which is a traditional 
Japanese poetry genre, one of its oldest; 
Osundare however regrets that these poems 
(which are published below) have little of the 
sublime virtues of a haiku - its carefully 
measured rhymes, etc.) His own 
recapitulative lines were scrawled on narrow 
strips of paper, dug out of a pit of files 
and documents. As he read them to me, he got 
lost in-between, unable to decipher his own 
handwriting in parts obscured by cancellations 
of words, superimpositions, etc. etc. 
Even so did he draw a chair and proceed to 
'copy out' the poems that in the end became 
complete rewrites and for some, instantaneous 
compositions. 
What did he feel ? One of the poems tell of his 
wondrous encounter with Japan's asahi 
(Japanese for dawn and sunrise). And 
touched... ? There was the hot sake, the popular 
brew made from rice, as ubiquitous as it 
was delectable. 
And then there were the happy chaps, who in 
common reckoning would have been thought 
as unimportant; one such was Miho Mizutani, 
the escort who spoke aflavourous dialect of 
English. It was Miho who stopped the procession 
on request at a fruits and vegetables 
market and apologised for not knowing the 
'nationality' of a particular species of grapes. 
All of those were taking place at a time and 
close to the place where Hasahara's mob 
was gassing Tokyo's underground train passengers 
to death with the SarinAndas would 
be evident from Osundare's tribute to 
Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the Nobel literature 
prize in 1994 (an article which we present 
here in full), one of the lessons of Japan is, as 
Osundare says, the startling sameness of a 
common humanity - for good or for ill - 
across all the continents of the world. 
NIYI OSUNDARE