Above: 
Yvonne Vera, 
Above right: 
Steve 
Chimombo, 
Right: 
Chejerai 
Hove, 
Far right: 
Bode 
Sowande 
Right: Ifeoma 
Okoye, Far right: Syl 
Cheney-Coker, 
Below: Manama Ba. 
Standards,
Niyi 
Osundare 
N the past one year I 
have visited several 
Nigerian Universities 
as Special Guest, 
Guest Lecturer, or recipient 
of creative 
writers' club awards. 
I have also taken part 
in literary and creative 
outreach visits 
to a number of secondary 
schools. Everywhere 
I have encountered a feeling 
of frightening anxiety, exasperation, 
even frustration among young talents 
who daily nurse the hope of becoming 
writers in the near future. Their main 
source of worry is the virtual collapse of 
the literary culture in Nigeria: the nonavailability 
of well-stocked public libraries, 
the scarcity of books coupled 
with the prohibitive prices of the available 
few, the miserable state of publishing 
in the country with the consequent 
shortage of outlets for new books, 
the drastic deterioration in the educational 
system itself. 
Beyond this general picture are the harrowing
individual pains. Take the 
case of a young, prodigiously talented 
university graduate who walked out of a 
well-paid job in order to devote his whole 
time and life to the writing of a new novel. 
After countless foodless days and sleepless 
nights, the manuscript is ready - an 
ambitious hand-written 600-pager which 
shakes whatever table it is put on like an 
earthquake. Right now this would-be 
novelist's dream is blocked by a most 
rudimentary problem: payment of a 500- 
naira typing expenses—in a country 
where a university professor's basic 
monthly salary is about 4000 naira! For 
several months now this 'big book' has 
been lingering, long-hand, yellowing 
each day, in the corner of a high-risk 
tenement room in one of Nigeria's cities. 
Our literary 
culture boasts 
more yellowing 
tales. At the Association 
of Nigerian 
Authors' con- 
Dambudzo Marechera 
ference in Benin 
City last year, 
another young 
writer stoked my 
wonder with three 
impressive poetry 
m a n u s c r i p t s 
which, if all things 
were not so unequal, 
should 
have been books 
toasted from 
bookshop to 
bookshop. But 
thumb-stained, 
dog-eared, these manuscripts still remain 
brittle tenants of a cockroach-infested 
box. Some young writers are so 
innundated by rejection slips that their 
nibs have started stumbling on the writing 
sheet. Others parade acceptance 
letters written ten years ago by publishers 
who have since shifted their concern to 
the production of primary school textbooks 
where the bread is not far from the 
butter. Thus whether it is in Lagos, Accra, 
Nairobi or Lusaka, many dreams lie 
locked in the coffin of the editor's draw- 
Arts Theatre Seminar 
This tragedy is not in any way 
restricted to the book business. It is a virus 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. II NO 4 
affecting every cell of the continent's creative 
organ. Just last week there was a 
passionate discussion in the Arts Theatre 
of the University of Ibadan (Nigeria's 
oldest University theatre) on the alarming 
reduction of theatre practices in the country: 
the literal death of the repertoire 
tradition, the paucity of stage activities 
and the resultant decline in the theatregoing 
habit of members of the university 
community, even the physical deterioration 
of the theatre itself — its leaking roof 
and decaying wooden louvres. This is the 
theatre where the great Axworthy made— 
and left — a mark; where the redoubtable 
Martin Banham moulded an impressive 
array of talents; indeed the theatre in 
which many of the plays which shot the 
mercurial Soyinka into global repute premiered 
to the astounded admiration of 
local audiences. This is the theatre which 
nurtured the prolific output of Femi 
Osofisan, Bode Sowande, Wale 
Ogunyemi and many others. 
Nostalgia took centre-stage at that 
gathering. Nostalgia compounded by a 
passionate mix of angst and anger 
Memory took us back to that golden era 
of the Seventies and early Eighties when 
the gigantic Dexter Underlay mastered 
every bit of that theatre and Demas 
Nwoko's astonishing skill transformed 
virtually every stage set into artistic masterpieces. 
We pondered the parlous state 
of the present even as the matchless 
acting and directorial voices of Dapo 
Adelugba, Segun Olusola, Femi Johnson, 
Paul Worika, Mat Imerion, Betty Okotie, 
Funmilayo Ajose Ajayi, etc came back to 
us with archival vigour We counted 
among our losses the disappearance of 
the Yoruba Travelling Theafres which 
combed every village in Western Nigeria 
in the Sixties, and whose dramaturgic 
and managerial styies enriched formai 
academic theatre studies and provided 
the subject for many scholarly works. 
The Arts Theatre seminar took me 
forcibly back to the anxieties of the 
creative writing students mentioned 
above. Like them the seminar participants 
raised questions about the suffocating 
political situation in the country, 
especially the curtailment of human rights 
which has placed 
freedom ol expression 
in dire jeopardy, 
the proscription 
of truth and 
the cultivation of 
silence by a ruling 
junta so scared of 
the power of the 
word. Many of my 
u nderg raduate 
and high school 
hosts actually 
wanted to know 
why the writing 
vocation is so perilously 
close to 
danger and starvation 
in Nigeria, 
in Africa. Many 
wondered if it was 
viable, even desirable to nurse the hope 
of becoming full-time writers when they 
grew up. A smallish, sharp-faced young 
man asked me pointedly: 'Tell me sir, can 
the present situation in Nigeria, in Africa, 
produce another Soyinka or Achebe?' 
Maybe at the end of this conference an 
answer will emerge to this question. 
I am fully aware that the contestation 
of the image of Africa as 'victim' is 
one of the laudable projects of this conference. 
In other words, the world would like 
to see a representation different from that 
which projects Africa as the misery-region 
of the globe, a place where all the 
people do is wait helplessly for the next 
famine or plague, then the missionary
generosity of aid-givers, a hell-hole still 
Conradianly dark. This, for sure, is the 
Western media image of Africa. We all 
know it is not wholly true; that, in fact, in 
some cases, it is meant to serve ulterior 
motives, some of which are sinister in 
design and execution. But in contesting 
this pernicious image we must not overlook 
the profound, almost apocalyptic 
problems besetting the African continent 
today. Africa writers have not; which is 
why their works bristle with disturbing 
images of Africa in a manner and matter 
that is excoriative and redemptive. According 
to a popular Yoruba proverb, 
'tina o ba tan laso, eje o le tan leekan' (as 
long as there are lice in the seams of the 
garment there must be bloodstains on the 
fingernails). 
For isn't Africa more 'victim' today 
than it was ten, twenty years ago? Consider 
the carnage in Rwanda, Somali, 
Liberia; the rebellion-strained peace of 
Sierra Leone, the Stone-Age despotism in 
Zaire, Kenya, — and Nigeria where the 
peace and progress of a potentially magnificent 
country has been annulled with 
the freest and fairest election in her history. 
Or Algeria where an almost similar 
electoral annulment has resulted in continual 
insecurity and bloodshed. We are 
talking of a continent currently going 
through a second slavery, whose best 
brains are in one form of exile or another, 
some of whose doctors and engineers are 
forced to eke out a miserable existence as 
street-sweepers, morgue-attendants, or 
jamtors in Europe and America. Can we 
really ignore, even for one oblivious moment, 
the'victimhood'of a continent whose 
economy is under complete control of 
foreign financiers, whose currencies have 
been so cruelly devalued that all they can 
purchase now are chronic poverty and 
untameable inflation? To take a test case: 
the imported hard-cover edition of Ibadan, 
Soyinka's new book, costs over 2,000 
naira (about the monthly salary of a 
universitygraduote worker) in someofthe 
few Nigerian bookstores, viable enough 
to have it on their shelves. Home-made 
books fare only a little better . The cost of 
publishing materials has jumped so astronomically 
that even the big-league publishers 
are finding it difficult to produce 
elementary textbooks and other 'breadand-
butter' titles. Any wonder then that 
the only book fair of any regularity and 
significance in the entire continent today 
is the one which takes place in Zimbabwe? 
In contemporary Africa those who 
want to write are denied the necessary 
space and means; those willing to read 
cannot find the book. This is why in a 
recent article poignantly titled literature 
and the Nation', Odia Ofeimun, poet, 
journalist, and current president of the 
Association of Nigerian Authors, raised 
the alarm that our literature is being 
'threatened with extinction by social 
regression.'? 
The above, then, constitute the context 
which produces our texts. But rather 
than allow these debacles to cow us into 
sterility and immobilism, many African 
writers have allowed them to 'hurt them 
into creativity'.3 Because they occupy (or 
are forced to occupy) a social and historical 
space considerably different from 
that of the early Soyinka, Achebe and 
their contemporaries, the 'post Achebe/ 
Soyinka' generation have devised literary 
methods which differ in some significant 
aspects from those of the earlier 
generation. There are historical and biographical 
reasons for this difference. 
Born shortly before or after the rash of 
independence (from hindsight'epidemic' 
would now be a better word!) which 
swept across Africa in the early Sixties, 
they arrived with the exuberant optimism 
of freedom and matured into the immeasurable 
decay of the post-independence 
era. They witnessed the dream of the 'just 
and egalitarian' society enshrined in the 
independence constitution transmogrify 
into nightmares of visionless leadership, 
the most bestial form of corruption, glaring 
socio-economic injustice, and utter 
lawlessness — all this husbanded and 
nurtured by visionless, despotic leaders' 
who soon decreed themselves into life 
presidents. After a few years of civilian 
misrule, in marched the stone-faced soldier. 
Then began what the immortal Christopher 
Okigbo called our 'iron' chapter, 
and Wole Soyinka later baptised as the 
divine rule of the gun. 
Texts and Contexts 
The 'post-Achebe/Soyinka' generation 
is thus confronted with frightening 
realities which challenged their conscience 
and summoned their art into 
urgent service. Theirs, to adapt the popular 
pnrase of G.G. Darah, the Nigerian 
scholar-journalist, is the literature of social 
command, extremely sensitive to the social 
realities around them, but without 
losing sight of the aesthetic imperatives of 
their works. Thus this generation shocked 
African literature with a combativeness 
and radicalism never experienced before. 
The thematic preoccupation remains 
the desperate situation of Africa, the stylistic 
hallmarks are clarity and directness of 
expression, formal experimentation, and 
a deliberate incorporation of African oral 
literary modes. 
Frank Chipasula says it all in 'Manifesto 
on Ars Poetica': 
And I will distil life into horrible adjec 
tives 
I will notclean the poem to impress the 
tyrant; 
I will not bend my verses into the bow 
of a praise song 
And I will point the light of my poems 
into the dark 
Nooks where our people are pounded 
to pulp 
Today my poetry has exacted a con 
fession from me. 
[Whispers in the Wing, p. 108) 
Indeed poetry has exacted equally 
bold confessions from many other poets 
of Chipasula's generation. Odia Ofeimun 
declares: 
I cannot blind myself 
to putrefying carcases in the market 
place 
pulling giant vultures 
from the sky 
and rounds off the poem on a deliberate, 
instructive note: 
A garland of subversive litanies 
should answer these morbid land 
scapes 
my land, my woman 
[The Poet Lied, p. 3) 
Examining the matter and manner 
of contemporary African writing in the 
vein of the excerpts above, the present 
writer reflects: 
the simple word 
is the shortest distance 
between two minds 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
VoLlI NO 4
There is no petname for 
injustice 
poverty 
has no bank for nicknames 
[A Nib in the Pond, p.9) 
before going on to a somewhat aphoristic coda: 
Art shorn of the human touch 
is art for ass sake 
(A Nib, p.6) 
Syl Cheney-Coker who indicts 'the Creole ugliness' of 
Sierra Leone and highlights the brutality of her 'Portuguese 
Conquistadors', 
practise(s) the art of poetry 
because all my country's misery rises up from my belly 
[The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, p.65) 
while Keorapetse Kgositsile, even in the dark days of apartheid 
made a visionary proclamation that 
'change is gonna come!', because in the 
lyrical words of Kofi Anyidoho, 
... those who took away our Voice 
Are now surprised 
They couldn't take away our Song 
Mongane Wally Serote 
(Ancestrallogic, p.23) 
Still 'troubador' in the Dennis Brutus 
sense of the word, the new generation 
poets also admonish and warn. In the 
prodigal days of Nigeria's 'oil boom', 
when her military ruler declared to the 
world at large that money was not 
Nigeria's problem but how to spend it, 
Tanure Ojaide foresaw the doom behind 
the boom: 
Oil boasts: 'For ever and ever 
Shall I remain on top of the water' 
It shall come, rock salt shall come 
To beat oil into profound loss 
[Children of Iroko, p.36) 
Because of 'the quantum physics of existential 
inequality' (Atukwei Okai p. 1 3) in 
the world we live in, we find in the poets a threnodic mix of pain, 
passion, and patriotism In a stubbornly declarative poem ' I am 
Bound to This Land by Blood', Olu Oguibe, a 'newer' member 
of the 'new generation' of African writers tells us 
And if I sing not of roses and rivers 
It's because I see rivers of blood 
[A Gathering Fear, p. 1 2) 
then goes on to make a chilling confession: 
My verse spreads ungathered 
In this spill of purple 
Mine is the cry of a ram tethered 
To the slaughterslab 
libid,) p. 13) 
Anger, angst, lulls of despair, bursts of hope, a frequent 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 11 NO 4 
amphitude of vision — these are some of the common attributes 
of the poets highlighted above. To them must be added the 
pensive, colloquial energy of the poetry of Jack Mapanje, Funso 
AiyejinaJaredAngira, and Harry Garuba; the nostalgic afflatus 
of Lupenga Mphande, Edison Mpina, Steve Chimombo, and 
Molara Ogundipe-Leslie whose fluent verse 'sew(s) the old days' 
into new seasons. 
As we have seen above, most of the poets of the 'new 
generation' articulate a clear consciousness of the place of the 
poet and the gravity of the functions of poetry in a tone and with 
a vehemence hardly experienced in the earlier generation. This 
is why a good number of them preface their collections with 
poetic manifestoes which enunciate a new poetics that is 
aesthetically and socially answerable. 
But the image and function of the writer as griot and 
raconteur are by no means the sole characteristics 
of practitioners of the poetry 
genre. Indeed many of the dramatists of 
the 'new generation' tell Africa's story in 
costume, sound, mime and movement in a 
manner whose physical representation 
forcibly engage the consciousness. There 
is a radical, even revolutionary project 
here too, a robust belief that the theatre is 
not just a house of speeches and props, 
but also a battleground for contending 
images and ideas. 
Wole Soyinka remains an enormousand 
highly seminal influence. But for 
the generation after him he has been both 
a venerable model and fertile point of 
departure. Thus is many ways the relationship 
of the 'new' generation to Soyinka's 
dramaturgy has been somewhat problematic. 
Of supreme importance to this redefinition 
of relationship is the 1977 
workshop on 'Radical Perspectives in African 
Literature and Society' organised by brilliant left-wing 
lecturers, writers, and critics of the Universities of Ife and Ibadan. 
In a manner reminiscent of such radical efforts in East Africa in 
the Seventies — efforts which resulted in a substantial 
decolonialisation of African literature and the establishment of 
oral literature as a legitimate area of study — the Ibadan 
conference de-mystified old gods, challenged sacrosanct canons, 
and laid out new parameters for the re-appraisal of African 
literatures, history, and cultures. In a clearly anti-Aristotelean, 
anti-'Great Tradition' fervour, the workshop proposed a shift of 
emphasis from obscurantist, Negritudinist myths to the biting 
urgency ofcontemporary social issues as fitting subject of literary 
discourse. A change in the writer's conception of the hero was 
also examined: the gods, goddesses, kings and nobles who 
populated the African stage were asked to yield place to the 
common woman and man - the real makers of history.
The ripples generated by this workshop 
have been far-reaching. This is 
evident in the dramatic output of Ola 
Rotimi who moved from the royal heights 
of Kurunmi and The .Gods Are Not to 
Blame (itself his adaptation of Oedipus 
Rex to the pungent satirical indictment of 
If and Hopes of the Living Dead. 
Perhaps the most prolific dramatist 
of the 'post-Soyinka' era ( in Nigeria, at 
least] is Femi Osofisan (who like Biodun 
Jeyifo, the brilliant literary theorist and 
critic, was one of the moving forces of the 
Radical Perspectives workshop). In play 
after play, Osofisan confronts the Nigerian 
society with the social and cultural 
horrors of its existence: social injustice in 
Once Upon Four Robbers and 
Morountodun, the question of power in 
Yungba Yungba, the need for compassion 
in Esu and the Vagabond Minstrels, 
and of recent, the pan-Africanist issue in 
Nkrumah Ni, Africa Ni. Two of his plays 
are even direct responses or counter-texts 
to those of the earlier tradition: No More 
the Wasted Breed counters the cyclical 
pessimism of Soyinka's The Strong Breed, 
while Another Raft is a rejoinder to The 
Raft by J. P. Clark-Bekederemo. 
In the 'new generation' drama, history 
re-connects with mythology and a reinterpretation 
of both yields a reality which 
provides a handle on the present — and 
the future. Ibrahim Hussein's Kinjeketile 
hints on the tenuousness of social struggle 
premised on mythic ontology, while in the 
Tornadoes Full of Dreams, BodeSowande 
provides a diasporic canvas of origins, 
migrations, and troubled habitations. In a 
somewhat existentialist flash-back of 
memory and consciousness, Tess 
Onwueme tells us in Legacies that the past 
may not really be as rosy as it has been 
made to be. 
Whether it is the myth-inspired The 
Lake God by Bole Butake, or the subtle 
parabolic criticism of Tanzanian socialism 
by Penina Muhando Mlama, or the 
indictment of political blindness by Sam 
Ukala's The Log in Your Eye, contemporary 
African theatre engages in a vibrant 
debate on the social, cultural and political 
issues of the day. The argument takes 
place most times in the formal theatre with 
seated ladies and gentlemen, and sometimes 
in the hit-and-run guerrilla platform 
in the streets of Samaru or He Ife (in 
Nigeria), or the community-based theatres 
in Zimbabwe, Cameroon, South 
African and the state-destroyed experiment 
in KamiririithubyNgugi waThiong'o. 
Continuities 
Prominent in all the dramas in this 
section are new theatrical forms and 
modes. For example, the Brechtian epic 
theatre and its alienation technique are 
vital aspects of Osofisan's theatre. The 
traditional story-teller technique features 
frequently in the drama of Penina Mlama, 
Zulu Sofola, and Olu Obafemi, while at 
times ideas compete with plot and characterization 
in Yulisa Amadu Maddy. In Biyi 
Bandele-Thomasneo-Absurdist echoes are 
energised by post-modernist trends. 
Like Soyinka's, Achebe's successors 
are many and varied. Without failing 
to acknowledge the urbane wisdom and 
quiet craftsmanship of the author of Things 
'Fall Apart, they have taken African prose 
fiction beyond the village square to the 
turbulent streets of the city where things 
are truly no longer at ease. Almost invariably 
the subject matter is the political 
chaos in post-independence Africa, but 
the styles range from the formal, poetic 
mode of Nuruddin Farah, Cheney-Coker, 
Chenjera Hove and Yvonne Vera, to the 
colloquial tenor of Dambuzo Marechera 
and Ken Saro Wiwa who strains no nerve 
in telling an exhilarating story in 'rotten 
English'. Significantly, this is also the 
genre that has produced the largest number 
of female writers. So, in a way, we 
also have a right to talk about the 'post- 
Nwapa/Ba/Gordimer/Saadawi/Head/ 
Sutherland/Segun/Aidoo generation'! 
Generally the thematic and stylistic 
trends in contemporary African prose fiction 
can be put under four broad and 
interrelated categories: marvellous or 
magical realism, mythic realism, critical 
realism, and a new burgeoning prose 
sub-genre called 'faction'. 
Time there was when magical realism 
was considered to be indigenous to 
Latin America, its progenitor being the 
phenomenal Gabriel Marcial Marquez, 
who has found worthy heirs and heiresses 
in prodigies like Isabella Allende and 
Carlos Fuentes Well, that was before 
Salman Rushdie gave it an Oriental habitation 
and Toni Morrison demonstrated to 
the world that 'conjuring' among "African 
story-tellers came before Columbus. The 
two most prominent practitioners of that 
genre in Africa today are Ben Okri (The 
Famished Road, Songs of Enchantment, 
and Astonishing the Godsjand Syl Cheney- 
Coker (The Last Harmattan of Alusine 
Dunbarj. Both novelists (especially the 
former) of course, owe more than they are 
ready to confess to the fabulist pioneership 
of D. O Fagunwa and the primitive imagination 
of Amos Tutuola. 
It must be said, however, that Okri 
and Cheney-Coker are not mere imitators 
of magical realism: the former's magical 
terrain is populated by ghosts and weird 
beings (which bring Soyinka's A Dance of 
the Forests powerfully to mind), while the 
latter's yarn is stretched by a liberal web of 
myth and history. 
And in this regard it shares the same 
borders with novels of mythic realism. 
Here Yvonne Vera's Nehanda provides 
an eloquent example. The heroine 
Nehanda is not only a widely known 
historical figure; she is here portrayed as 
a medium, prophetess, visionary, and liberation 
fighter. In this novel historical truth 
is constructed through mythic fabulation 
and literary mediation. The history of Zimbabwe, 
from white occupation to black 
liberation struggle is endowed with a new 
reality justasChenjerai Hove's Bones tells 
the post-liberation story through his dusklike 
characterization and ruptured narrative 
chronology, and Shimmer Chinodya's 
Harvest of Thorns covers three decades of 
Zimbabwean family life in the intimate 
context of the history, politics, and culture 
of that period. 
Most of the novelists of the new 
generation tackle reality head on with as 
much mediation as their art allows. The 
issues of social injustice, corruption, unemployment, 
cultural alienation, gender oppression 
and other vices which make Africa 
such a hellish continent loom large in 
narratives of this category. We are presented 
with familiar places and 
recognisable faces. In Festus lyayi critical 
realism is boosted by socialist realism 
(Violence, Contract, Heroes); and so con- 
African Quarfrrly 
on the Arts 
Vol. II NO 4
sistently, the author presents the aspirations 
and frustration of the 'small person' 
in a society dominated by cannibalistic 
'giants' — in a tone and tenor which 
bears a slight resemblance to the effort of 
Meja Nwagi (Down River Road). Like 
Chinodya, Isidore Okpewho depicts the 
vital link between domestic and public 
spheres in times of war or peace. 
Without doubt, this category is 
dominated by female writers determined 
to articulate the realities of the African 
woman long silenced and 'othered' by a 
ruthlessly patriarchal system. In the works 
of Miriam Tlali [Muriel at the Metropolitan, 
etc) Nawal el Saadawi (The Many 
Faces of Eve) Ifeoma Okoye (Men Without 
Ears), Tsitsi Dagarembga {Nervous 
Condition), Zainab Alkali (The Stillborn), 
Karen King-Aribisala (Our WifeandOther 
Stories), Omowunmi Segun (The Third 
Dimple), Rebeccca Njau (Ripples in the 
Blood) and many, many others, the 
woman gains a pride of place that was 
hardly dreamt of in the narrative universe 
of the Achebes and Soyinkas (with the 
significant exception of Sembene 
Ousmane and Ngugi wa Thiong'o). But 
this restoration is not an exclusive female 
affair: the narrative world of Nuruddin 
Farah, for example hasa place for women 
who are capable of feeling, thinking, and 
acting.
It can be confidently said' that in 
contemporary Africa, the dividing line 
between fact and fiction in perilously 
thin. Dreams and nightmares swap places 
with such amazing ease that one is 
tempted to think that the entire continent 
is one surrealist text with a few interludes 
of actuality. This situation has given rise 
to a prose sub-genre that can be described 
as 'faction' (fact + fiction). As far 
as I know, the most intriguing instance of 
this sub-genre is Kole Omotoso's Just 
Before Dawn, a book which provides an 
encyclopaedic excursion through 
Nigeria's history in a style which takes 
liberty with historical factuality. Historical 
events often transform into fiction-like 
episodes, historical figures take on the 
garb or novelistic characters, old, longforgotten 
speeches are re-cast as fresh 
dialogues, and, of course, the plot shifts 
and shunts to the dictates of the author/ 
narrator's imagination. In some places 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. II NO 4 
the setting looks so palpably real, in others 
it assumes the mystic suggestiveness of a 
tale told before the world began. 
It is interesting to note that the faction 
genre is no respecter of generational 
divides. There are striking stylistic and 
narrative similarities between Omotoso's 
Just Before Dawn and Soyinka'a Ake, 
Isara, and Ibadan. The major difference is 
that the organising principle of Soyinka's 
narratives is auto-biographical, that of 
Omotoso is somewhat more impersonal. 
In the end both authors are engaged in an 
experimental representation of the biography 
of a country. In a way, faction may 
do to African writing what it has done to 
Nurudeen Farah 
the 'new journalism'. One only hopes 
that it would succeed is pushing forward 
the frontiers of African fictive mode without 
allowing the liberty gained in the 
process to degenerate into narrative licence.
It will be noticed that throughout 
this essay, I have included the phrase 
'post-Achebe/Soyinka' in cautious quotation 
marks. This is because I am utterly 
sceptical about the 'post' which has now 
become so fashiortable a tag in contemporary 
discourse (as i have said eisewhere, 
the post' in 'post-coionial' is a 
vicious lie). Both Achebe and Soyinka are 
still very much around — and creating. 
Even in the literary republic, it is still a 
crimirfal sin to bury the living! So whatthis 
essay has done is to highlight some of the 
thematic and stylistic developments which 
have taken place in African literature 
because of, in spite of, or beyond these 
two profound trail-blazers. Mine, therefore, 
is an account of continuities and 
ruptures. 
But one thing is sure: 
the period in which Achebe 
and Soyinka launched themselves 
on to the literary scene 
is saner and kinder than the 
one in which their successors 
are presently trapped. 
Whereas their works received 
enthusiastic attention 
from publishers and were 
distributed all over the world, 
overseas publishers now see 
African literature as a bad 
risk, while local ones only 
manage to bring out a few 
titles over a long period. 
African literature today is 
thus in a painfully illiterate 
bind: books published by 
Africans abroad are not 
available even in their home 
countries due to 
unfavourable currency exchange 
rates, while the few 
published in Africa are not 
available beyond their immediate 
locality. To make 
matters worse, those journals 
and magazines which 
provided vibrant literary outlets 
in the Sixties and Seventies 
are either now extinct or going through 
protracted dormancy. The bookshops are 
empty. This is why in a recent article 
frighteninglytitled 'When Ugandan Pens 
Could Write No More', Ayeta Anne 
Wangusa declared: 
Walk into the Makerere University 
Bookshop - it's a joke. One can ride 
a motor cycle into it and ride out 
without casualties
Wangusa's statement holds true for 
bookshops in other countries south of the 
Sahara except, perhaps, Zimbabwe and 
South Africa. 
These, then are the states of African 
literature today. But people are still writing, 
creative writing classes, literary associations, 
newspaper and magazine columns 
and many others are bent on giving 
credence to Wally Serote's credo that we 
'are not the lost generation'. And as 
Ogechi Iromantu has prophesied in her 
newcollection, we may one day reach the 
state where there will be 
No more screaming. No more crying 
no more lies to cover the wounds of 
sadness and grief, 
no more unforgettable pain 
this is the world intended from the 
beginning 
I see peace in the land for all 
[Outpouring of Innocence, p.3) 
Ms. Ogechi Iromantu is 14 years old. GR 
• Text was presented at the School 
of Oriental and African Studies, 
London, during the Royal African 
Society conference late last year. 
AN AFRICAN JOURNAL OF NEW WRITING 
Published THREE times a year .h, 
• The influential African literary journal is back. 
The most recent numbers are: 
31 (1995); 32 (1996); 33 (1996). 
• Silver Jubilee Issue - No. 34 (October 1996) 
will focus on Nigerian Literature in the Last 
Decade (1986 • 1996) 
• Other forthcoming numbers will focus on 
Post-Apartheid South African Literature, 
African Women Writers, African-American 
Literature, The Greying Generation, 
The Laureates. 
• Manuscripts are welcome - 
Poems, short stories, one-act plays, 
essays, interviews, reviews. 
DF: Enugu 
Notes 
2AM News (Sunday Edition), July 30, 1995, p. 9 
3. Ofeimun, p.9 
4. 'Path of Thunder', in Labyrinth, Heinemann 1971 pp. 63-72 
5. Niyi Osundare (1993), African Literature and the Crisis of Post-Structuralist 
Theorising, Ibadan: Options Book & Information Services See also by the same 
author (1995) ' A Wondrous Healing Vision: an Essay Around Kenzaburo Oe's 
'Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself, Seminar paper, Dept. of English, University 
of Ibadan, Nigeria. 
6. In African Literature Association Bulletin, vol. 20, No. 2, Spring 1994, p.69 
(Primary sources: Only those from which direct quotes have been taken) — 
7. Anyidoho, K., (1993) Ancestrallogic & Caribbeanblues, Trenton New Jersey: 
Africa World Press. 
8. Cheney-Coker, S. (1980), The Graveyard Also Has Teeth, Heinemman 
9. Chipasula, F. (1991), Whispers in the Wings, Heinemann 
10.Iromantu, O. (1995) Outpouring of Innocence, Lagos: Pulse Marketing 
Communications Ltd. 
1 1. Kgositsile, K. (1971) Seven South African Poets ed. Cosmo Pieterse, 
Heinemann. 
12. Ofeimun, O. (1989), The Poet Lied, Lagos: Update Communications 
13. Oguibe, O. (1992), A Gathering Fear, Ibadan: Kraft Book Ltd 
14. Ojaide, T. (1973), Children oflroko, New York: The Greenfield Review press 
15. Okai, a (1974), Lorgorligi Logarithms, Accra: Ghana Publishing Corporation 
16. Osundare, N. (1986), A Nib in the Pond, lle-lfe: University oflfe Monography 
Series. 
17. Serote, W. (1992), Third World Express. Cape Town: David philip Publishers 
Ltd. 
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