Calixthe 
Beyala 
POSTMODERNISM 
the Impossible^ 
__ Death of the 
African Author 
Ben 
Jclloun 
GLENDOR/ 
Mia Couto 
Ben Okr 
r Barthes 
N1968,
, 
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Frenc 
r Rolan 
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- 
losopher, announced the 
'Death of the Author1, 
Wole Soyinka was in 
detention for opposing 
the prosecutors of the 
m Nigerian civil war. The 
poet, Christopher Okigbo had been 
killed in the early skirmishes of the 
war. 
ODIA 
OFEIMUN 
Chinua Achebe was m exile, en 
gaged in matters as distant from the l.terary 
as, rais.ng funds for and campaigning for 
the riseoftheB,afran Sun MongoBet, was 
m Pans on a contested visa, his book soon 
due for banning ,n both his Camorounian 
tilv Aln, mi Qi,,itl 
• in the Arts
homeland and France. Naguib Mahfouz's book Children of Gebelawi was banned 
in his country. Camara Laye was on the run from Sekou Toure's gendarmes. Can 
Themba had drunk himself to death in a Joburg shebeen. Bloke Modisane, 
overwhelmed by the depression of exile, was reported to hove jumped down from 
a New York Skycraper. Alex LaGuma was still incarcerated on Robben island. And 
Dennis Brutus, freed from Robben island, was in exile aswasEzekiel Mphaleleand 
many other South African writers. One case parodied the other. The fortunes of the 
producers of African literature, was evidently in such dire straits that it would not 
have required a stretch of the imagination to grasp what the French philosopher was 
talking about, Roland Barfhes, however, did not have the African writer in mind when 
he declared the Death of the Author. His verdict of an endgame for the writer was 
absolutely European in conception, It was also rather indifferent to, if not blind, to 
critical aspects of the European experience; that is, blind to the impact of the scriptural 
productions that armed the Enlightenment, the liberal revolution, the Students' Revolt 
of that year, the Algerian Revolution, and a whole forcefield derived from the 
maligned' author. It was, in effect, a generalising move whose applicability to any 
particular environment-including the African one- could only have been considered 
within a forced sense of universality. 
As it happened, the common temptation of traditional literary criticism was to 
treat the idea as just another bubble among several bubbles for which French and 
Western literary history in general are famous, It seemed no more than a passing 
distraction for Academies in a Europe that was free of war and without the extremes 
of poverty that was known in other continents. It may have remained |ust that- a 
mere distraction, covered by good-humoured condescension • but for the fact that 
, two decades after, the zlggurat of theories • postmodernism • of which It forms 
a part, dominates Euro-American literary establishments, It Is even being valorised 
as Third World=friendly, Its ground-clearing career In relation to African literature 
has tended to fellew the social Darwinist presumption of the colonial enterprise 
aeeerding to which the African writer, moving from tradition te the modern and then 
fe the postmodern, as Frederic Jameson pictures It In The Geepolltkal Aesthetic, Is 
doomed to be ambushed by all the problems and fashions that have afflicted the 
European writer. The fact that the majority of African writers, at least thebetter known 
ones, began and continue to write in European languages and within genres of 
European provenance, has tended to give credence to this presumption. And so, the 
question has appeared straight-forward enough: If the Author is already dead in 
Europe, how could he or she hope to survive for long in Africa? 
This, of course, is not a question that can be pursued without causing disquiet 
among people who are aware that the relevance of European 'discourse' to Africa 
is so often a matter of forced-draft universality. Knowing the economic, military and 
cultural complexes which give weight to certain ideas-not excluding the phenomenon 
of bullish expatriation of Africa's 'theory-class'and the power of international funding 
agencies over researches in African universities- the sense of disquiet can indeed be 
quite over-powering. With particular reference to the idea of the Death of the Author, 
what rankles is that it came at a time when African writers were just emerging from 
the belly of the anti-colonial struggle onto a stage that had been set and dominated 
by Euro-American writing for centuries. To think of itl Just when it was still Morning 
Yet On Creation Doyfor many African writers, this French philosopher comes along 
with a discovery almost tailor-made to kill them off. This was how it looked and 
what it looks like when considered that Africa had been dubbed by the best minds 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3 GLENDORA . ..
in the West as a Dark Continent, a Heart Of Darkness, a continent without history 
or philosophy, because the written word had no dominion in African affairs. In a 
continent which was still predominantly non-literate and one in which literacy 
campaigns had been so much hostage to the myopia of native rulers - Europe's 
political stepchildren- to talk of the Death of the Author was like killing off those who 
were ready to script their people into history. From this standpoint, the extension 
ofBarthesto a full dress discussion of African literature cried for a confrontation, 
or at least a necessary interrogation, to draw attention to the intellectual anxiety 
thatit implicates, whether for Europe or for Africa, and the manner in which it could 
becloud the circumstances that point to a literal, rather than a metaphorical, Death 
of the African Author. 
Needless to say, outside the jargon and the hype of academic which 
surrounded it, the idea of the Death of the Author appeared simple enough. For 
Roland Barthes, as critics like David Lodge have essayed to make plain, the Death 
does not imply that there are no living individuals who regard themselves and are 
treated by other people as writers and authors. It does not deny that the names to 
be found on the covers of books refer to actual persons; that even pseudonyms are 
used by determinate individuals whom we can see on television, on street corners 
or have a drink and a fight with; it does not dispute the fact that publishers pay 
royalties to these authors or that it is authors not their ghosts or phantoms who win 
the prizes so often celebrated in the media. The idea of the Death of the Author 
is not insisting that biographies of authors, enjoying such a boom in the Western 
world, are about fictitious entities who never wrote a thing. Barthes discounted such 
mundane elements to concentrate on authorship as a practice without an individual 
source. He was obviously working in the tradition of that movement-inspiring notion 
to be found in all cultures which presume that individuals do not make history, and 
which in European experience had been raised to the level of doctrine by thinkers 
like Karl Marx and Frederick Engels who have made quite a lot of history. 
IN
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original source of a text is the language in which it is produced. 
Language is viewed as a hand-down from preceding users who have 
invested it with tricks and mysteries that account for the meanings 
that a particular text may yield. 
The classics of the past are assumed in this sense to have famished new 
directions. What remains is for what has been written to be rewritten revised 
imitated, parodied, calumnised, contradicted, and affirmed by other texts Language 
is seen as some kind of fascist overlord imposing forms of creativity upon narrative 
.n a manner that makes the talk of the originality of a particular writer quite suspect. 
This fascist over ord is assumed to have locked up meaning in a prisonhouse so that 
every sense that a text makes interweaves, interpenetrates and intersuggests 
another. It ,s anot er way of saying that all those who use a language andean 
make something of a literary tex.arepar, authors ofthework. The writer as author 
is assumed tohavedied because anyone whocanread andmterpre, a,extbecomes 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
GLENDORA..«,.. Vol. 2/No. 3
a co-author of what is produced. A simple logic emerges: If all of us are authors 
then there are no authors. 
True, Barthes may not have had the African writer in mind when he nailed 
the coffin of the author. But his theory may well have been speaking for that period 
in pre-colonial Africa when ritual art, as Chinua Achebe has noted in the case of 
Mbari Art among thelgbo of Nigeria, was treated as a collective product. In that era, 
still not fully overtaken by bourgeois capitalist ethic, even the individual agent, the 
artist, who executed a sculpture did not dare to acknowledge his contribution in the 
open because it would have been sacrilegious to do so. By the same token, proverbs 
which passed from mouth to mouth could not be credited to individuals. Only elders 
and the dead, the ancestors, could be taken as the source of the wisdom contained 
in them. From this viewpoint, it would have been taboo to lyricise over proverbs to 
be found in Wole Soyinka's A Dance Of The Forests or Chinua Achebe's Arrow of Cod 
except as an acknowledgment of the collective genius of the communal heritage. 
Presumably, the writer merely extracted the proverbs from the common pool in the 
Yorubaor Igbo language and placed them in the mouths of'fictitious' characters. Even 
then itwould still have been outofplace to praise the writers for rendering theYoruba 
or Igbo proverbs so well in English. Michel Foucault, who did not believe it was really 
enough to announce the death of the author, pressed the point home when he 
described the author as 'a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one 
limits, excludes and chooses, in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the 
free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction'. 
The words, 'in our culture', is significant as it is a distancing from other cultures in which 
there is no author to serve as impediment or where access to meaning is not revised 
or affronted by the author's capacity to limit, exclude, or choose. Simply, Foucault 
reduces the author, from a once-supposed centrality to the role of mere conduit, or 
worse, a ruse. He presses this point towards the necessary hegemony of discursivity 
over all practices and arrives atthe conclusion: that writers'are' mere functions rather 
than authors. He grants authorial status only to initiators and founders of discursivity 
like Karl Marx and Siegmund Freud (because their works contain'characteristic signs, 
figures, relationships, and structures which could be reused by others') He denies 
the same status to the novelist's text (because the text merely 'opened the way for 
a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or principle 
in their work'). This distinction between novelists and initiators of discursivity, no matter 
how disguised, turns out to be really a direct heir to Plato's discourse of poetry 
as a mere issue of divine frenzy, incapable of producing knowledge. It is more: in 
the universe of discursivity, the author is an initiator of difference as against mere 
imitation or affirmation, as in art. In essence, the making of difference rather than mere 
analogy becomes the mark by which the author is known; and the mark by which 
founders of discursivity are embossed over writers of fiction. Foucault reminds us 
in this regard that: 'Texts, books, and discourse really began to have authors (other 
than mythical "sacralised"and "sacralising" figures) to the extent that authors became 
subject to punishment, that is, to the extent that discourses could be transgressive'. 
Transgressivity here is viewed principally as a code of difference, by which 
originality may be determined and whose absence is deemed capable of ensuring the 
disappearance of the author as 'genius, as perpetual surging of invention'. Foucault 
raises the stakes, so to say, by granting discursivity the status of a science or a model 
in science: In the Middle Ages, as he points out, scientific work was accepted as 
true when it was marked by the author's name; in the 1 7th and 1 8th century, however, 
scientific discourses began to be received for themselves 'in the anonymity of an 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3 GLEN DORA......
established or always redemonstrable truth; their membership in a systematic 
ensemble and not the reference to the individual who produced them1. This shift is 
supposed to indicate that authorship does not arise from something intrinsic to it, 
but is subject to changes in perceptual and institutional climates. What Foucault 
does not dispute, what he in fact affirms, is that power has a lot to do with it as with 
Kuhnian paradigms in scientific communities. Power, lop-sided power, certainly had 
a lot to with it in the traditional societies • the feudalist and partriarchal gerontocracies 
- in which the author was discounted (or repressed) and the freedom to deviate from 
norms and taboos was held in abeyance by fairly draconian codes. From Barthes 
and Foucault's postmodern standpoint, this power converts into an apparent war 
on the author and as such a liberating dig at the rise of 
capitalism which, never to be forgotten, enabled and 
promoted property rights through which the author-function 
parades as something of consequence. In fact, from this 
perspective, we are supposed to take as models those 
societies in the past which never heard of or never permitted 
individual authorship; we are to assume that the rule of the 
collective which this implied is a necessary ideal of 
liberation; an ideal which views individual interventions that 
were once supposed to generate or regenerate fictions as a 
hindrance to their free circulation, 
One tense of this envisaged goal of liberation is the 
location of a prior source of discursivity either in a scientific 
community that enforces a paradigm 
in Kuhn's sense of the word or 
a traditional community or a religious 
group that Imposes a ritual If 
not a common language, At In 
•denes which turned from the 
Inspired individual leitntlit towards 
a community ef scientists In 
order to redress subjectivity through 
intersubjectivity, discursivity is 
placed topographically on similar 
footing. The pacification of individuality 
through insistence on 
redemonstrable truth in science is 
equated with the force of collective 
sanction in traditional society. The 
point however is that a difference 
exists which distances science from 
that which overcomes a community 
through naked power or enforced ritual. Kojo Laing (top), 
Okot p'Bitek 
As it happens, redemonstrable truth in science takes place, more or less 'out (above) 
there ,n a test site, a field outside the subject, and there, to be imitated and affirmed 
and contradicted, oway from subjectivity while truth outside i,, as in the realm of the 
c. T H " 5 7 ZT ^ 'inSid6' °f *he SUbieCt Wh6re -^objectivity has to 
be ploughed and threshed through analogies as Foucaul, taught. Puf m o r e J a p h o r i - 
ally th,s is to say, that the irniting, excluding and choosing by which the author 
cond,t,ons the flow of knowledge in science is achieved by lifting the bridge of 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
discourse above the mush of subjectivity. To arrive at a similar effect in the fabulist arts, 
it is a case of lowering the bridge into the mush of subjectivity in search of a siltbed, 
a common sensibility. Whichever way it may be viewed, whether through ritual, 
science, a free interplay of images or the imprimatur of naked power, the point is that 
the pacification of individuality and the consequent redress of subjectivity is assumed 
to be capable of annulling the place of the author. 
Reading Roland Barthes, Foucault, and their disciples, intimates the notion that 
this lowering of thebridgeof discourse is, properly speaking, incapable of producing 
real meaning. We are induced to acknowledge the immersion in subjectivity almost 
as an act of faith in the search for meaning - a search that it is necessarily a leap 
in the dark that proves itself only through experience; meaning, in essence is a 
phenomenon which testimony (language) may unveil but only a constant collocation 
of analogies through discourse, can effectively corroborate, affirm, contest or 
correct. True, the commonsensical proposition of the Death of the Author is that the 
multiplicity of analogies, brought to a junction in every subject, rubs out the kink 
that makes the author possible. Which is to say that whatever the muliplier, no piling 
of analogies can create the basis fora rupture, a departure from the norm, that makes 
a real difference. In which case, following the privileging of discurvisity as the 
necessary assigner of the status of author, we ought to be obliged to accept this 
absence of a kink in the firmament of analogies as the ultimate inscriber of the 
disappearance of the author as 'genius, as perpetual surging of invention'. 
Inferentially, this is the case until we consider how analogies may and do rise 
qualitatively rather than quantitatively from the silt-bed into the open air of discourse. 
The point to note here is that, as Foucault and Barthes project it, it is not so much 
individual persons who are to be held responsible for what happens in the 
prisonhouse of language: it is texts that speak to texts, not persons to persons. 
Straightaway, we enter the order of intertextuality in which what is written today is 
a child of, a slave of, a factor of, and a function of what was written before. All of 
us, in short, are supposed to be already in the texts as our languages speak for us 
in advance. Foucault sets out the manner in which it does. 'A text1, he argues, 'is 
made of multiple writing drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations 
of dialogue, parody, contestation but'- and this is the big but-'there is one place 
where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not as was hitherto 
said, the author...'. Furthermore, 'a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its 
destination'. And that destination, the junction, so to say is'... the reader'. This reader, 
as Barthes notes,'without history, biography, psychology, is simply that someone 
who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is 
constituted'. We may ask: How much of a 'single field' may this reader be who has 
no history or biography if as we are also told by Roland Barthes, the T which 
approaches the text is already itself 'a plurality of other texts, of codes, which are 
infinite or more precisely lost1 (S/Z). Decidedly, we are obliged at this level to concede 
that the meaning of a text is not what a particular author may intend: the argon is that 
there is no univocal, no single'theological'meaning of a text. Since texts speak to 
texts, revise texts, debunk texts, then texts are privileged inscriptors of meaning doing 
what they can with what belongs to all texts in common. Hence there should be no 
sleep to lose over the distance between reality and the way reality is presented. What's 
more, the fact that a particular signification of reality maybe frayed or deadlocked 
is simply taken as proof that all signification must be so. That some text may be more 
representative than the other is considered a matter of detail: a matter of language 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3 GLENDORA,
which is used to exercise suzerainty over reality through citations that are 
'anonymous un.raceable and yet already read1 [Work to Tex,, 160). In effect, the 
,dea of the Death of the Author sacrifices or hedges the possibility that a text can 
be deployed to lay a claim which is expected to be sustained by a more or less 
determinate response from those who receive the claim. Since texts are always in 
trouble with one another and the reader is supposed to have the freedom to enact 
his/her own interpretations of the texts, there ought not to be, according to the 
argument, a basis for trusting the author who presumes to yield a message that 
can be readily shared in common by all. Which would just have been all right as a 
ticket into the heaven of relativism but for the question which it leaves open: the 
question of how much room the reader can have to impose a particular construction 
on whatever is on offer. Surely, as the author may indeed be untrustworthy as no 
univocal meaning may have been intended in the first place, the question is what 
makes the reader so trustworthy as a junction of meaning in a world in which a 
plurarity of meanings for a text is recognised as norm. This is a question which, 
what matters, so to say, is the necessity for every 
individual to make meaning for himself and herprojects 
but an overcoming of aesthetics 
unaddressed, suggests that the next announcement to be made would have to be the 
Death of the Reader. Surely, if the author is already dead and there is none to motivate 
and design and create outside language then we are obliged to grant the role 
of author to language which becomes its own motivator, as the Ultimate Subject in 
extremis. Language, as Subject, credited with all the dispositions ofpersons, can then 
overaw author and reader at the same time as pre-figured by various postmodern 
turns: in the feminist critique of essentialism, Rorty's pragmatism, Lyotard's local 
narratives , Foucault's genealogies, Queer theory or the play on rhetorical strategies 
in the social sciences. The short of it really is that language as a means for acquiring 
knowledge is forced to succumb to the presumed indeterminacy of the knowable or is 
it unknowable subject in an ostentatious relativism that eats its own tail.Evidently, it bites 
its own tail and dies; it resolves nothing. At best, it centralises a desultory discursivity 
which may enhance the capacity of the critic-of Foucaultand Barthes and their heirs 
-to play creator: a transfer of function that may not be intended to, but annuls the 
subjectivity of the Other in the vain presumption that one subjectivity easily substitutes 
for another and that the risk of representation is resolvable by discourse 
Against such a relativism that so easily becomes banal, the search simply has 
fobeg.n for that pre-mofivafor of language who makes from ready material a world 
that elects or evokes behaviour from a repertoire of finite or, if you like, infinite 
patterns. The initude or infinitude of the patterns is not, for that matter, really the issue 
The ,ssue is that the intervention of a particular subject in a culture in waves of 
intertextualities, is a unique act even if intertextualit/s manifestation in a given 
self in a world of freedom of choice in which 
discursivity is not seen as a function of aesthetic 
GLENDORA, 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
performance comes in common fibre. We may belabour this by recalling the 
emblematic interface between Chinua Achebe, the author of Arrow of God and Joseph 
Conrad, the author of Arrow of Gold: between, on the one hand ,the European travelling 
on a steamer on the River Congo who could not make out the faces nor could he 
understand even if he heard the voices of the people peering from the forests and, on 
the other hand , the child of the forest retailing the lores absorbed from living among 
his people against the noise of the steamer interfering from the background. Due to the 
accident of imperialism, the two become citizens of the same language and aspirants 
to a common morality ; they are trapped in an unequally yoked unequally shared 
context in which representations, due to ignorance bred by distance, are discrepant. 
In the inevitable culture-clash of incongruent representations the drawline between them, 
between native and stranger, can be superseded in a widening of shared commonalities 
but this does not remove the need to confront extant incongruences 
and discrepancies in the representations. The truth of 
the matter is that incongruences and discrepancies cannot be 
determined unless there is, in principle, a conception of a 
world 'out there' in principle that enables hard distinctions to 
be made between the subjective spaces of the two. Only a 
refusal to accede to it empowers the kind of luxury that 
animates the un-named character in Ben Okri's Astonishing 
The Gods who declaims that 'Names have a way of making 
things disappear... Things die a little when we name them'. 
Yet, not to name, or to be nameless would be no solution. It 
so happens that dead things do come alive when they are 
named: that aphasia is the fate of those without a name or 
those unnamed especially in their own stories. Or, put 
differently: whatever new circumstances and new interactions 
may intervene in the life of a language, and whatever new 
perspectives or inflexions may be opened up beyond the 
grooves provided by prior usages or non-use , the naming 
function is primary to meaning. It may be jettisoned only at the 
risk of the complete annulment of intelligibility. Consequently, 
where naming subsists and representation is to that extent 
potentially feasible, some notion of a world outside language, 
which language seeks to represent but cannot exhaust, 
will have to be upheld. Who makes the connection 
between what is represented and the language as a means 
of representation is not as important at this level of the 
argument as the fact that you need to have a sense of a world 
outside language for meaning to be validly pursued. There is 
a logic to it beyond relativism which contrasts with the need 
for that linguistic adventure framed by oriental philosophers 
Kole Omotosho 
(top), 
Farida Karodia 
(above) 
who have asked 'Is there a sound in the forest if a tree falls but there is no one around 
to hear it?' The straightforward answer ought to be yes. Without a quibble. Although 
the dramatist Femi Osofisan who toasted this question in his inaugural address 'Playing 
Dangerously: Drama at the frontiers of terror in a postcolonial state' would appear to 
be more thrilled by the capacity of such questions to enable us think the unthinkable, 
the existence of a world outside our heads, beyond our 'insides' and our consciousness, 
whether we hear its sounds or not and whether we have a name for it or not, cannot 
be doubted with consistency. Doubted consistently , the possibility of meaning would 
be displaced. Hence, against the character in Okri's Astonishing the God, an 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
alternative may be considered as intimated by the narrator of Jeaneatte Winterson's 
Written On The Body who posits that 'the most unoriginal thing we can say to one 
another is still the thing we long to hear1. As it goes: 'I love you1, is always a quotation. 
You did not say it first and neither did I, yet when you say it and when I say it, we 
speak like savages who have found three words and worship them1. Nor do we have 
to worship them to know that pain or pleasure derived from the absence or presence 
of love can exist without the language that describes or matches it. A rose by whatever 
name called will smell as sweet. A rose even if unnamed will smell as sweet. Hence, 
what love and the smell of a rose can yield are no less momentous because of their 
analogical statuses as 'quotations'. Each moment, it may well be said, packs a punch 
that can make a difference to perception, consciousness and, wait for it, discursivity. 
Nor should discursivity have a millenarian potential, a sea-change attribute of the 
magnitude of a Freud or a Marx, for it to make a difference that assigns authorial 
status. Unless the death of the author is also to be matched to the disappearance of 
the reader, there ought to be an acknowledgment ofthe impactthat little'differences 
make to discursivity. They are 'little' limits, exclusions, choices, which the reader can 
embody or personify but are already posted, already prefigured, not necessarily 
wholly, by an'origin in the author. Without the limits, exclusions and choices which 
the author constitutes and executes, meaning must die and the reader with it. The 
reader's share in authorship is truly blown if the author even as a mere adept at 
quotations, ceases to exist. 
Not to forget: in the idea ofthe death of the Author we confront here in disguise 
an old argument about art's capacity to educate and conscientise. In a society 
supposedly overtaken by the death of the author, it is a case of discounting the 
efficacy of the literary arts, as distinct from the written word, over which there has 
been a life-and-death struggle in virtually every society. Evidently, where the author 
has died, writers are not only not to be taken seriously, it would seem to be wrong 
to take them seriously. Art, essentially, is then forced to enter a realm away from 
the big issues which shake and condition the cultural economy of the times. The big 
issues find unbidden entrance however or better, they barge into discursivity, only 
when a Salman Rushdie or a Naguib Mahfouz scandalises a religious group which 
then responds as if literature matters. To the believer in the Death of the Author 
literature no longer matters. What matters, so to say, is the necessity for every individual 
to make meaning for himself and herself in a world of freedom of choice in which 
discursivity is not seen as a function of aesthetic projects but an overcoming of 
aesthetics. With discursivity embossed, the critical ambition would appear authorised 
to remove from disciplinary considerations that which goes by the name of literature 
as an issue of aesthetics. The problem of course is not new. 
It is a problem that has centred on the necessary assumption, since Emmanuel 
Kant's Critique of Judgement, of an implicit disinterestedness, a capacity for 
universalisation. and yet the inevitable recourse to subjective judgement in the 
determination of taste. Much meal has usually been made of this necessity in order 
to knock it sideways, and then to hang it on the horns of the well-known dilemma that 
since learning, sex, class, religion, nationality and ideologies differ it ,s always 
d.ff.cult to arrive at the consensus implied by the need for distinteres.edness and 
umversalisa.ion.Thisdifficultyiss.re.ched out of proportion to justify the abandonment 
of the need to search- because it, s first ofallindeed a search -for a common sensibility 
as thebasisforaesthetics. Whatseems ,o be ,gnored ,s that whatever makesPoss,ble 
any proportion of shared taste within a g.ven class, religion, nationality or sex also 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
creates 'horizons of expectation', a sharing, across various other boundaries. This is 
why inspite of the differences between readers within a given culture, it is possible 
to have shared dispositions, shared 'competences' - a more or less common 
sensibility. And if indeed competence is not an immutable, untransferable property 
of cultures, then it ought to follow that the boundaries of a community or culture are 
only as immutable as the competence which defines them. One thing is to recognise 
that language which can occlude things can also unveil them. Once a language 
is translated into another, it provides the basis for a search for a common sense 
and sensibility which is not absolutely stable but can offer the possibility of stable 
meaning based on the anticipation of consensus if not unanimity between groups, 
classes, nations, if not the global village. For certain, human survival calls for such 
an anticipation which must recognise that a certain sense of unanimity on some front 
is necessary for the survival of community, any community. To make the unexamined 
assumption of unanimity in advance of such a community is less pernicious than 
to deny its possibility. 
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speaks to text in the fort of intertextuality, it is 'someone' who 
becomes the reader of the text. 
Consciousness is seen from the standpoint of this 'someone', this atomised 
individual who is 'already written' within the sense of community presupposed by 
language itself. It leaves a mental gash, which should make one wonder why there 
is an atomised sentinel on guard duty in this post-modern walk around but no 
collective security within which individual sentinels may share and interpret what is 
accosted in the prisonhouse of language. The question is relevant: as through 
linguistic communication, the consciousness of different people can be organised 
and re-organised to yield a basis for common action, common responses inspite 
of the differences of interpretation that they may have. Even if there were no common 
ways of doing or responding to anything, the sheer necessity for intelligibility and 
the entrenchment of platforms for the defence of human survival, calls forth the need 
for invention of commonality. The very idea of human rights, for instance, stems from 
this. Deny the necessity for it as a principle; and human rights would be out the window 
as Peter Wilkin (Index on Censorship, 6, 1994) notes in response to Umberto Eco's 
claim in an earlier issue of Index (1/2,1994) that 'we need not be concerned with the 
truth as "there are only opinions, some of which are preferable to others'. Since 'not 
all preferences are equally valid and Umberto Eco concedes that 'we end up seriously 
confused if we think all ideas have the same value,' then it ought to follow that certain 
principles are needed if society is to remain democratic and free. According to Wilkins, 
the boundaries of 'tolerance and the intolerable' which Eco would not agree to draw 
in principle must, be confronted not just in terms of preferences that cannot be equally 
valid, but 'distinctions between democracy and fascism that are as profound and true 
as they are irreconcilable'. Assuredly, not accepting their irreconcilability wrongfoots 
the apparent distaste that Umberto Eco has for fascist regimes. Otherwise, if, taken on 
his word, it must assumed that between fascism and democracy it is a matter of opinion 
not fundamental principle, it puts naked force on the same moral pedestal as the sense 
of commonality and shared sensibility built through free speech, freedom of 
African Quarterly 
<2n the Arts 
Vol 2/No. 3 GLENDORA.v-
Procession of 
first 
generation 
African 
authors - 
Top row: 
Achebe, Beti, 
Brutus, 
Ekvsensi; 
Middle row: 
Emecheta, 
Head, La 
Guma, Wa 
Thiong 'o; 
Bottom row: 
Farah, 
Peters, 
Ousmane, 
Soyinka 
Courtesy: Abadina 
Media 
Resource Centre, U. 
I, Ibadan 
GLENDORA r.»
assoc.ahon and widespread education. It puts us in a bind such that whenever and 
wherever one opinion stands against another, the question of truth and rationality is 
reduced to a mere issue of the will to power. Not that they could never be issues of 
power but we need always to consider that they are not exhausted by such issues At 
any rate, such a reduction tends to outdo Nietzsche and merely reiievL us o e need 
to see will as exercsab e beyond the ken or standpoint of atomised zealots What I 
^ss.b.hty and real.ty of a communal reader to which we may 
;;a d :rrn o t a heideaof 
reality, of a common humanity Dis n c r o m i I' 
t, the reclusive self, the beloved mo b T ^ ^ ^ "° 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
reason why the calling into being of the individual reader should exclude the other. 
Or, what force may we counterpoise to the fascist overlord of every individual's 
'theological meaning' if the search for an interactive production of commonality - 
which is what the collective reader is all about-is stumped. For that matter, if the 
fascist overlord must be acknowledged then all rituals proper to the encounter ought 
also to be acknowledged. Since we have a collective author in language, there 
ought to be a collective reader. And if there is 'someone' who by that fact is assumed 
to be taking part in authorship, why not, we ought to have the individual author, too, 
who makes peculiar things from the stock that belongs to all of us. In essence, the 
proper thinj is to recognise the two and to find out how they interact. There is no 
reason to expect only a unilinear basis for the interaction. There is certainly a clear 
warrant for weighting the scales in favour of one or the other. Although Foucault 
wished it as a matter of depriving the subject (or its substitute) of its roles as originator, 
and of analysing the subject as a'variable and complex function of discourse', he 
also provides the measure by which to identify the author as initiator. Ifweusehis 
own schema, we must reject his finding as no better proof exists that a novelist could 
initiate a discourse than the fact that critics make theory around, about and upon 
their works in the manner in which Foucault avers that 'unlike the founding of a 
science, the initiation of a discursive practice does not participate in its later 
transformations'. On Foucault's own ground, we must argue that 'the work of the 
initiator of discursivity is not situated in the space that science (read: criticism) defines; 
rather it is the science (criticism) or discursivity which refers back to their works as 
primary coordinates'. Works of art being self-contained ought actually in themselves 
to pass the Foucualdian test better than science. Or else, remove novels, drama, 
poetry from issues of aesthetics and emboss them as discursive practices or deny them 
discursive status, yet will there always emerge the problem of how language comes 
alive, motivated from inertness. Not to deal with this problem is to be unable to fathom 
how the subject status with which language is credited by proponents of the Death 
of the Author accommodates the unsaid, the unrepresented, the maligned in history. 
Is it a case of where there is no text, there is no life? 
An ominous trend for Africa is clearly evident in the baggage of ideas which 
go with the post-modern embossment of the text. Although the leeway granted to 
the fascist overlord of language appears to weigh the scales in favour of earlier 
societies which knew nothing about scriptural authorship, the notion of the text which 
saturates the idea of the Death of the Author clearly discounts the illiterate or nonliterate 
society. With text having all the space in the theory, there can hardly be 
space for a phonocentric society in which the spoken word is King. Where text 
is master and mistress and 'determines' reality, a society which places value on 
narratives in an unwritten form, has had it. As in much of precolonial Africa - nonliterate, 
pre-literate or illiterate - the narratives, lacking scriptural status hence lacking 
in 'ready' textuality and hence having no Author, cannot count for much within 
the discursivity supposedly weighted on its side; it becomes the case that in a society 
where there is no text, it is not just the Author that dies, it is the whole society, its history 
and culture, its philosophy and science that is presumed to have died. Pio Zirimu's 
notion of orature, of oral literature, as a basis for defending the memory of a people 
if thus completely annulled even while theorists may deploy it for their purposes and, 
like the Madingo griot, Mamadou Kouyate, celebrate it to the point of 
discountenancing the value of literacy. Yet, celebrate orality as anyone might, 
masters of orature like Kouyate, not to forget Socrates, would not be speaking to 
us today but for the reclamation of the Word made possible by scripture. The 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3 GLEN DORA
individual author as such may die in pre-literate societies due, as in the case of the 
Mbari artists, to social repression of the individual by the .collective. In hterate 
societies, the author is presumed to have died because language has been overused-
because the author has in fact over-written. Between the two deaths, lies 
the question: what to do by way of burial. The fact remains that the European writer, 
faced with the spectacle of languages that have been 'scriptured' and over-narrated 
to the point of banalisation, lives in a different conundrum from that of many African 
communities which do not have languages that could be said to suffer that fate. The 
room for recreating the world is still too large in many African languages for that to 
happen. All over Africa, the European languages in use are facing up to a reality 
that their native users did not and often do not anticipate. Even with the hegemony 
granted to them by history and current political and literary usages, these languages 
still have so much mobility to achieve in order to fully accommodate the disparateness 
of history and social rhythm that it must encounter before it can reach the level of 
devaluation which post-modernists valorise as a quality of the contemporary 
condition. As for the indigenous African languages including those that had been 
reduced to written form before colonialism, they are far from running the threat of 
banalisation through over-use. The danger to them lies more in many of them being 
atrophied through disuse, and misuse outside thegutenberg galaxy. This is one reason 
that Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong'o decries neglect of indigenous languages 
and the use of 'foreign'languages by African writers. To Ngugi, the neglect of African 
languages constitutes a death precisely because of the danger posed to African 
literature by the diversion of genius to the ploughing of fields belonging to the 'official' 
languages. For him, the African writer writing in any of the languages bequeathed 
by colonialism would need to be resurrected into his and her responsibilities, to go 
back to the source, not just in linguistic terms but through immersion in the life of the 
folk, the rural majority, the peasantry who are the repository of the culture that still 
lives outside the text. 
Arguably, Ngugi has revised the initial argument in Decolonismg the Mind 
which made writing in anything but the mother tongue almost treasonable. Although 
readers of his Moving the Centre, his more recent collection of essays, will notice 
a movement allowing for possibilities outside the mother tongue, he is yet to free 
the African writer in European languages from the imminent death sentence that 
hangs over his and her head. The Nigerian novelist, ChinuaAchebe never thought 
one needed to lose too much sleep over it. Achebe did not mind the use of supposedly 
non-indigenous languages for the purpose of writing African literature. His stand, 
centring on the question of nationality and nation-building, takes on board the 
complications imposed upon Africans by the logic of 1 884 Berlin which brought 
together peoples of diverse languages and histories within the same colonies. Unlike 
Europe which had had two centuries to undergo construction and reconstruction 
. of nation-states without external gerrymandering, the project which African writers 
have had to face in their search for audience is one of building a sense of community 
between and across different language groups in the face of imperial powers overexertmg 
presence and making demands that are not necessarily in the interest of 
the Afncan native. As Achebe has seen it, the problem was not critical in the'rather 
small, reasonably stable and self-contained societies'of the traditional past But in 
the 'wide-open, multi-cultural and highly volatile condition known as modern 
N.ger.a.for.nstance, canawriter even begin to know who hiscommunity isletalone 
dev,se strategies for relating to it? If , w r i t e n o v e l s i n a c o u n t r y | n w h | c h m o s , ^ ^ 
are illiterate, who then is my community? If I write English in a country in which English 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
may still be called a foreign language, or in any case is spoken only by a minority, 
what use is my writing?' 
Not every African writer may experience Africa's dilemma in this Achebean 
sense of it. But in a society where an author may feel this way, the Death of the 
Author come.' within an absent discourse, the kind that emerges when an illiterate 
philosopher trapped in a literate situation demands to know 'what paltry wisdom 
is that which is congealed in dumb books?' It should be obvious that where the 
Author is dead because books are perceived as dumb, the issue of building a 
common sensibility involves a special challenge- the creation of that which does 
not yet exist. The teller of tales, in the circumstance, may not be fruitfully distanced 
from the builder of new nations. In relation to the new community of sensibility that 
has to be created - whether through the evolvement of common languages and 
visions, eradication of illiteracy or the erection of common institutions for solving 
socio-economic problems- there is a place for an author, a creator, who fashions 
something new out of material that may or may not have been already available. 
In terms of what needs to be created, there is, so to say, room for one who, to borrow 
Barthes' words, 'exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives, for it, is in the same relation 
of antecedence to his work, as mother to his child'. Indeed, just as a woman is 
recognised as a mother only after the fact of a child that has been biologically or 
socially acquired, every participant in the project of building a new community, like 
the world of a story, may be said to have a prior or simultaneous birth with what 
is brought into existence. The predication presupposes a subject. The builder of a 
new community or of a new civilisation, may be transformed by and through what 
is being built; but theapriorinessof the builder is not thereby to be discounted. In fact, 
in Twentieth Century Third World, to discount the aprioriness of the builder is to 
succumb, willingly, to First World over-determination of discourse. More often than not 
this amounts to succumbing to ignorance, blatant and subtle racism, if not a 
paternalistic, forced-draft universalism. In essence it needs to be recognised that, to 
the creator of nations as of literary works in Africa, there are clearly unused resources, 
especially of language, waiting to be exploited; there are areas unpenetrated by 
'scriptural' texts in English or African languages which empower a dream of new 
directions an3 new meanings. Even where these are absent, the author would still 
wish to exercise the power of naming the world afresh, naming the unnamed, and 
relating in a new way to the already-named which takes on a new aspect as a result. 
Indeed, as new circumstances and new interactions intervene in a language, new 
perspectives are opened up beyond the grooves provided by the fascist overlordship 
of prior usages and disuse. 
In effect, this is to say that writers are not stuck in the groove of existing 
languages but can goad it to do what it never did before- including the transgression 
of existing formalities and pre-existing analogies. Needless to say, this is why 
authoritarian regimes in history and all manner of thinkers, from Plato totheAyatollah 
Khomeni have tended to sue for a literature police. It is for the same reason that 
the Soviet writer, Andrei Sinyavsky, determined to take responsibility for his writings, 
once argued before one such literature police that he published his book under 
a pseudonym; he did not write under a pseudonym. Or should the writer just plead 
his and her death qua the Death of the Author as a way of escaping responsibility 
for whatever offends the reader? 
To extend the argument a little: we may recall once again the situation in 1968, 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3 GLENDORA,.v..w
the year of the Nigerian Civil War and the year of Barthes1 Death of the Author. 
Christopher Okigbo had just died in Biafra and Wole Soyinkawas in detention on 
the Federal side. Could it have been in order for us to treat the events as being of 
little consequence because their creativity was already a function of a language fed 
by past classics and usages? Given the post civil-war significance of their works, it 
must take some myopia to overlook the yawn that the absence of their writing would 
have left in the life of a people for whom, say what you may, the way a story is 
told as much as the story told can still confer authorship. What is recognised here 
is that thedifferent strategies deployed in thetellingofthe same stories, can so affect 
the way we look at the world that the world itself and we, who relate to the world, 
may no longer be the same after it. Whatever the question about it: there are good 
grounds for saying that the way a story is told if not the story itself can make all the 
difference to how the reader is recreated. It can make all the difference to existing 
languages in favour of a new way, perhaps only another of the many old ways, 
of grasping reality. The reader is not thereby denied a space in which meaning 
can be remade. But the reader was never quite a free agent. The strategies employed 
by the writer ensures that limits existwhich the reader may assault or revise but cannot 
remove. To remove the limits, the circumscriptions which the author represents, is 
to banalise the textand endanger meaning through indifference to ordistancing away 
from definite and traceable social and historical contexts. oNCE this is accepted, attention is called to a central 
lapse which bears belabouring in relation to the Death 
of the Author. The lapse conies in the form of a sleight 
of mind which posits that although it is text that speaks 
to text in the fort of intertextuality, it is someone who 
becomes the reader of the text. 
In relation to the Death of the Author the originating historical contextwas indeed 
definite and definitive: one in which it was believed that society (read: Western 
society) had arrived at its destination. It has boasted the triumphs of science and 
technology, industralisation and enterprise, democracy and affluence. It has meant 
a society in which the civic freedoms, universal adult suffrage and an all-pervasive 
ideology of free choice are shored up by mass literacy, mass production and the 
means, if necessary, of mass suicide. It is a society that has so potentiously breached 
necessity in favour of freedom that it can afford to produce the welter of theories 
and anti-theories which posit the death of the author. Surely, homo sapiens could 
afford to be nothing but homo ludensifall the structures proper to the elimination 
of necessity were in place and could be relied upon to be self-reproducing for the 
foreseeable future. Theorists, in the circumstance, being true descedantsofNiezetche 
andhisatheoretic theories, acquire warrant, or so it seems, to think that godhood 
could be approximated through the bubblegum of verbiage. It is almost as if they 
w.ll the circumstance into existence: a peculiar Western circumstance, one in which 
the European did not knaw enough of the world, treated the rest of the world as Other 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
but traded on the hyped right to speak for the universe. It has been a glorious run from 
Nietchean discourses which declaim that 'God is dead' to the notion that the 'novel 
is dead'or dying; that poetry and drama are at the limits of performance in a natural 
habitat of obscurity and silence; the end of ideology has come opening up the 
ideology of the end of knowledge, while philosophy is in a guagmire because 
language has been devalued and banalised beyond recognition by the mass publics 
and mass politics oftheage.lt is a circumstance which, at the last post, asFukuyama 
has since presented it, proclaims the end of history. In this connection we are better 
helped to appreciate the mock-serious sendupof the whole conundrum by the Italian 
writer Italo Calvino, who saw it boiling down to a faith in technology rather than 
in the makers of technology. Calvino envisioned that this faith would be eliminated 
through the invention of a literature machine that can be programmed or selfprogrammed 
to yield literary classics in accordance with the most advanced 
developments in cybenetics. For that brave new world, the Author may not only be 
dead but the successor has already been found in the computer. At any rate in a 
society that has already arrived at its destination, to repose 
faith in the computer as the creative genius-an invention for 
the creation of other inventions - spells the exhaustion of an 
age if not of reason; it suggests an endemic euphoria of 
arrival at the terminus of all civilisation, or submission to a 
driving sense of unreality. It could also imply - and I think 
that this is more like it - that far from arriving at their 
destination, those who accede to these views have lost sight 
of destination. All that they have done, perhaps, successfully, 
is to define themselves away from the other, the non- 
European, still saddled with so much pre-history. Turning 
their faces towards the text as the end of wisdom, they see 
industrial or post-industrial production as authorising the 
freedom to interpret rather than to remake the world. They 
spell the unseen and the unknown in a Foleless social progression 
as they fasten upon what the text vouchsafes in the 
manner in which Western scripture has permitted it through 
the ages. 
What must be confronted is that societies in Africa are 
not just spatially but historically distant from those for which 
the idea of the Death of the Author has been hatched. To be 
historically distant is not here a reference to temporality but 
differences in social and economic yoking. While great 
violence, if not injustice, is often done and also often removed 
by yoking the world into a common globality, necessary 
indifference to either is called for to acknowledge the very banal fact that African 
societies unlike Western ones have not yet arrived at their destinations nor have they 
finalised what the destination should be. Nor have they reached an establishmentarian 
consensus that there should be no looking forward to a destination, as the 
open-ended discourse of the Death of the Author suggests. At any rate, unlike the 
European societies of Barthes'background, contemporary African societies confront 
the crisis of existence in the Twentieth century within the logic of scarcity rather than 
abundance, mass illiteracy rather than a surfeit of literacy, the brazenness of 
oppression, both inter-racial and intra-racial, and deprivation rather than the 
effluence of the freedoms of speech and association. The daily lot for many is the 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol 2/No. 3 GLENDORA ,
rank distortion of choice and life-chances by personalised power strutting at the 
expense of institutional designs. Indeed, over the years,, with the songs of 
independence wilted and the promised lands that cornered the imagination of 
generations in virtual dystopia, the vultures in Africa have been having a literal rather 
than a metaphorical swoop. Not just a matter of the drought and famine in many 
parts of the continent, it is the tragedy of human errors: governments that can only 
be changed by military coups; one party autocracies outdoing in heinousness what 
WoleSoyinka has called the divine rightofthe gun; leaderspreaching national unity 
while dutifully organising pogroms that divide their people while the yawning jaws 
of detention swallow up even the loyal opposition. We may well add the absolute 
atrocity perpetrated by ruling elites, usually clients of some foreign power - no 
need to give examples- whose mismanagement and graft yield personal foreign 
bank accounts that explain if not outbid the size of the national debt. In recent years, 
the chickens have come home to roost in economic structural adjustment 
programmes induced by foreign creditors resulting in the closure of factories, 
hospitals, schools and the retrenchment of more than a third of labour force in some 
countries. The list of unwholesome factors can be lightened to wearisome dimensions: 
explaining the daily disorientation, the grisly spectacles and the general wretchedness 
and misery of life which give the cast of motiveless malignity to the circumstances 
of power in many African countries. They suggest, too, societies in which the idea 
of the death of those who can create something new, and transgress the usual, and 
whose practices promise a deviation from the norm of adversity and crisis, cannot 
just be swallowed with grace. For good reason-too. 
m"'"«been or „ « " ' ' $ " IT *o happens that killing off the a i lu, • . 
happening in * e struggl! f 
hat 
crcomstances of many African countr- * ' e P metaphor r * metaphor,, th thee 
1* ^ *•*» 
° f h e one sided truths' ofpower. Inessence wh e n T ? h 
-ctionthat spells what may be termedTh olTj 
Post-modernist ^JLJ^Z^^ 
dimensions as those'who h a " T l ^ ^ ' ° P U ^ ' ^ ' 
determine the , i m i t $ o f , " * • " * «n their side seek to 
*e public spac p o e to obscurethe,r ZS^t^9 I W " ^ « " 
Thei Theirr ai aimm i is t to T grant " ln$t"»"ental power. place to the 
- n o r under a higher, p ^ ^ ^ 1 
outhontarian societies of the world as they s e ff 
socetiesmaybesaid to provide the backdr 
Of theAuthor^, it is the illiberal ^ ^ 
hererefersto thatgenera. absence of the feed" 
;n most African countries has made the 
and the ,ournalist tend to carry the burden 
pos,t,on to speak for themselves As ! 
- we,,, the writer faces the 
-V 'ogive voice to the 
s, the 
in °" 
l l l i b e r a l i - 
which 
h e C r e a ' - e writer 
may not be in a 
«» all those who 
detentiion 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
without trial of journalists and dissidents and the dismissal of lecturers who ostensibly
teach what they are not paid to teach. One form of unfreedom, ramifies into others.
With specific reference to the creative writer, decades of siege have produced a
pattern: writers who are critical of the regimes in their countries either must face
detention, stay in exile, risk their books being banned or get killed. The list of writers
in exile, because they face a danger of detention, physical liquidation or economic
annihilation, is a long one. Some of the best known and not so well known Nigerian
writers, about seventy at the last count, including Chinua Achebe, Olu Oguibe, Ola
Rotimi, Tanure Ojaide, Esiaba Irobi, Kole Omotoso, Omolara Ogundipe-Leslie live
abroad; Wole Soyinka was until Abacha's exit having almost a fourth bout of it;
it is as if Nigerian writers have taken the baton from writers under yesterday's
Apartheid and in the footsteps of other denizens of exile like Camara Laye author
of The African Child whose situation was tragic because he apparently succumbed
to silence while in exile. Even after the fall of Siad Barre from power in Somalia,
the hope that Nurrudeen Farah would end the normadic existence that he had led
outside his country for two decades was made more distant by marauding warlords.
Mohammed Choukri's books, banned one after the other in his native Morrocco,
placed his fortunes in a similar light as that of the Kenyan writer, Ngugi WaThiong'o,
A—
censorship, in which case he ceases to be an effective
writer. Or he can become a state functionary, an option
some Kenyan writers have now embraced, and once again,
cease to be an effective writer of the people or he may
risk jail, or exile, in which case he is driven from the very
sources of his inspiration
who has lived in exile since his detention without trial and the ban of his books. Like
Choukri whose attempt to publish in Arabic, the language of the popular majority,
shook up the censors, Ngugi found himself in trouble with the authorities when he
began to use the Gikuyu language. The dimension unveiled by their common
predicament is that the authority of authors would be more critical if literacy were
more widespread, and if more African writers could reach the non-literate majority
through a language that they speak. The Kenyan and Moroccan examples, in their
negation of art, may be compared to the situation in Nigeria's First Republic when
Hausa and Yoruba poets, dramatists and musicians were exiled or had their works
banned because of the direct access of the majority tothe 'medium message'. Today,
as witnessed by the ban placed on Soyinka's Trials of Brother Jero at the National
Theatre, writers are simply denied air time on radio, forbidden to use theatres and
public facilities; or government newspaper editors are ordered not to grant them
space unless, as ostentatiously announced in Soyinka's case, it was to report his death.
Incidentally, the journalist who reported that books by Ken Saro Wiwa were seized
from vendors and that a vendor was detained for selling the books, was himself
picked up by security agents in 1 997. The situation, until the death of General Sani
Abacha, was worsening by the day as it had become in Kamuzu Banda's Malawi,
African Quarterly
on the Arts
Vol. 2/No. 3
where the poet Jack Mapanje had to opt for exile after five years in detention. The 
patriachate in Malawi made no distinction between medium OF message. Whatever 
it did not understand or take a liking to was defined as dangerous. Not surprising, 
Malawi had the longest list of banned books and banned authors outside Apartheid, 
ranking as oneof the most dangerous spots for the survival of authors since the written 
word began to gain dominion in African affairs. In the decade of Khomeini's Fatwa, 
Somalian writer, Talib Saleh, suddenly found his book Seasons of Migration to the 
North, published decades before, under the ban of a fundamentalist sect. Nonagenarian 
Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the 1987 Nobel Literature prize was stabbed by 
one such fundamentalist. In essence, what the African creative writer faces is a 
situation in which detention, exile, or death of a fellowwriter has theeffect of defining, 
or misdefining, the limits of self expression. It poses a serious dilemma to those who 
mean to be relevant to the solution of the problems of their time. According to Ngugi 
the writer 'can adopt silence or self censorship, in which case he ceases to be an 
effective writer. Or he can become a state functionary, an option some Kenyan writers 
have now embraced, and once again, ceaseto be an effective writer ofthepeople 
or he may risk jail, or exile, in which case he is driven from the very sources of his 
inspiration. Write and risk damnation. Avoid damnation and cease to be a writer ' 
Incidentally the dilemma is not exhausted by the war-torn parts of Africa - Ruanda 
Burundi, Liberia, Somalia - but also in the areas of the new-fangled pursuit of 
democratic transition all over Africa. In the West African sub-region where a 
makesh.ft tradition is being engineered for soldiers to strip themselves of their 
m,l,tary umforms in order to rule as civilians, the dilemma is fast becoming a staple. 
econom^ 7 '"^7 f^^ f^^ relate 
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Books Collective- those valiant networks in the international book-selling industry 
- the VICIOUS segmentation of the world of Afriron u- u r , mausrry 
andoneAfrimnm i oraof African publishing from the rest of the world 
countries has meshed with current e c o ' I ' 
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Polishing aesthetics and marketing , r t e q i e T " ^ b ^ d ^ h-» of 
ense in which decades ago even w .M "" ^ P ^ n ° books in the 
9ezl^:::zt7T?athi9her 
Indigenous publishing which ought to fill hi ° V ^ " " ^ ^ W ° 9 e - 
P-es so well. Although the counly easi y , 1 ^ ' $ ^ ^ ^ " ^ ^ 
number of books published, thepercentaL "** A f H c a n c o u n W « i"the 
°f the industry as commerce Z I T A ^ Publish-9 ^ of the death 
- - w materials, indigenous pub is na ' " ^ ^ " ^ ° " f™>9° — 
^valued to the status oLsue p p e , ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ °n d 
-hich, for no,,i»era,e s o c i e t i e s Z I T T ^ C ° ^ ° ^ •» culture 
engineering even in bad times 'has alsoh j , P^ary goals of social 
-digenou blih could no ^ ^ ^ ^ in t h e best of times, 
a d e r b y i e r j t : t r k s whichi-ed the 
9- — w,th less number of people in need of books, 
African Quarterly 
GLENDORA ,. ™ on the Arts
there were bookshops enough to moke the 
day for the reader. The Nigerian example of 
bookshops reduced to glorified distributors of 
I 
stationery and primary school texts says it all. 
The unspoken part is that indigenous 
publishing has been knocked sideways in 
accordance with the strange logic of the debt 
servicing conundrum and World Bank conditionalities 
which require governments to invest 
on the importation of books rather than 
support local publishing. It is a situation 
incapable of exaggeration as the taste for 
books which normally lagged at an atrocious 
distance behind the snail pace in the 
eradication of illiteracy is now being pressed 
back to the tradition of sheer orality. The claim 
is heard ever louder that there is no market for 
books here. Although there are more hands 
than ever before to reach out for books, the 'no 
market' is assured by prices scaled to heights 
that scare away potential buyers. Inevitably, 
the logic of opportunity costs tends to take 
over. The general inflation in the economies 
already ensures that book-buying takes a 
secondary place to more existential demands. 
The average book buyer, normally more disposed 
to books that are for promotion at 
school or at work, is simply being weaned off 
imaginative literature. True, this may not 
Central Business 
District, Harare 
affect the more established writers who still 
have a captive audience in the school system 
and outside. For the relatively unknown 
writer who is required by publishers to be an 
established genius before the proof, the destination 
appears to be limbo, outside the 
school system which, to think of it, is not much 
of a saving grace in these times. Thanks to the 
apoclayptic economics of the regime of 
Structural Adjustment Programmes, and the 
undertaker logic of its homegrown operatives, 
there has been a virtual decimation of 
educational structures, a relative reduction in school populations, virtual closure o 
University Departments, and reduction of libraries to museums of moribund boo s 
and journals. Since the Universities forawhole decade have tended to enjoy indehr" e 
closures that may end with the originating crisis still simmering, it has not been |us 
a case of moribund books but moribund institutions, lacking the sap tor se - 
rejuvenation. Consequently, just as there was the famous Band Aid for the.vie ims 
of drought in the eighties, the nineties saw Africa entering the age of Book Ai 
redress Africa's book famine. Except that donations from international organisa i 
rise only to raise the myopia of state policies on libraries and book culture, bpec 
African Quarterlv 
on the Arts 
GLENDORA . . . .
to imaginative literature: while book donations may be rising, book donors hardly put 
the African creative writer in the picture. Thus, the situation of the African wr.ter 
appears to be beating a retreat to its beginnings in the forties and fifties when the 
absence of a sizable literate class at home turned many an African writer to Europe 
for audience. The truth, all the same, is that few writers can survive in the ensuing 
battle for audience outside the not so hospitable environment at home. 
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This and the inward-looking propensity that a common polity induces in 
publishing ventures and book trade overtakes literary ambitions. In particular, the 
wayward representation of Africa in the Western media and the general bias 
mobilised by old and new imperialisms have helped to shore up a disposition that, 
as Wole Soyinka encountered it at Cambridge in the seventies, receives African 
literature as an issue of anthropology rather than literary arts. The disposition is 
hardly exhausted even as we look into another century. It has been given a lot of 
fillip by the death of the euphoria that came with independence: As independence 
palled and as the novelties, great expectations and titillations of headline uhuru 
worship receded, wearisome pictures of coups, draught, famine and their camp 
follower of disaster-reporting assaulted the 'fun' in literature. While 'post-modern' 
audiences in Europe were ready-seduced by the need to have less history, less social 
responsibility, less commitment and more escape, another kind of alienation was the 
lot of the African audience. As Nadine Gordimer notes it in her recent collection of 
essays Writing and Being there are those angling for the reduction of the elevated 
diction of African literary texts to meet a vast semi-literate audience. No doubt, if the 
writer had to meet the different forms of alienation, this would have entailed the 
banalisation of the language of literature. The writer would have to risk a career of 
irresponsibility- shying from disaster-reporting, looking away from ethnic imbroglios, 
apartheid (while it thrived) and the horrid assaults on normal life by Africa's military 
and one-party regimes that have done so much to increase the culture of illiteracy. 
Even then what would be the guarantee that such capitulation by the writer to the 
insistent forces of a beleaguered environment would overcome market closure? 
The short of the matter is that there has been no hiding place for the African 
writer. This is another way of saying thpt the solution to the current crisis in African 
literature is not to be found through a naive reaching for cover. There is no place 
to hide. The African writer is so securely in the middle of the whirlpool that little can be 
done by way of escape. It will have to be acknowledged that African literature will 
remain for some time to come in an obscure corner on the European shelf without 
necessarily arriving where it should be on its own turf. Realism, in fact, dictates the 
necessary recognition of the prospect that the proper emergence of African literature 
outside Africa would depend on the force of African literature within Africa. Unless the 
literature is thriving on the ground in Africa, the story outside, far from becoming 
° saving grace, will go to pot. We may continue to berate centuries of European 
misrepresentation and the dross of parochial Western educational systems for the 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts
extant reality. We may go on ad nauseum lamenting the spectacle of supposedly 
enlightened Western circles in which African literature remains a curio, an issue of 
anthropology rather than literary arts, butghettoisation would remain the lot hounding 
an African literature that has no readership at home. Nor is it desirable or wholesome 
for a European audience to abandon or be expected to abandon its home-grown 
writers simply in order to embrace African writers. The best that can be expected 
is for those who have reasons to interact with Africa to relate to individual countries 
or to the idea of the continent through the literatures. No question about it: the intensity 
and volume of the interactions will be determined by the improvement in those 
political and economic factors which, at the moment, keep the countries and the 
continent down. Thus, we ought to have it as an axiom that any improvements in the 
foreign market for African literature would tend to imply that the conditions existing 
for the survival of an audience for literature, an audience that has enough means 
to sustain itself and to spare, is already having a career on the ground in Africa. 
while boo
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put the African creative writer in the picture. Thus, the 
situation of the African writer appears to be beating a 
retreat to its beginnings in the Forties and Fifties when 
the absence of a sizable literate class at home turned 
many an African writer to Europe for audience 
in the light of an international environment in which things African suffer from biases 
is not enough. The biases need also to be placed in the context of how the illiberalism 
and poverty of the African environmentattract untoward tendencies to desired objects 
and aspirations. Also, it will have to be admitted that the evident dilemma which 
the African writer and African literatures face is resolvable only to a limited extent 
through individual genius. No doubt, whatever happens, some individual authors 
would survive the evident dilemma inherent in a collapsed publishing industry and in 
national economies brought to their knees by the destructive engagement of an 
illiberal political class. All the same, such survival needs to be predicated on the fate 
of the whole community: on how the uplifment of whole communities can make a 
positive difference to the expression of individual genius. Recalling that there was a 
time when African writers literally trooped the colours from conference to 
international conference to haggle about how or whether literature can be relevant 
to the solution of Africa's problems, the question now may well centre on how literature 
could survive the failure of African states. This question has been claiming centre-stage 
since the collapse of several political economies and the emergence of book famine 
which has confronted whole generations with the equal annihilation of the book, 
the writer, and the state. The writer has been overtaken by the need to consider not 
just Irving Howe's epigramatic statement that 'where there is no freedom politics is 
fate' but beyond it, that the writer must be activist enough to create a society in which 
it is possible to live and work as a writer. 
I
Individual authors must, on their own, choose, where choice is still possible, 
how essential creativity must connect with communal goals to make a difference. 
In this regard choice is of course also about exemplars. The example of Christopher 
Okigbo, the writer who picked up a gun to fight in Biafra has been much celebrated 
and escoriated according to the temperament of individual writers and critics. 
Beginning with Ali Mazrui's's iconoclastic novel Trial of Christopher Okigbo, and 
J. P. Clark's distinction , often parroted out of context, between the writer as writer 
and the writer who picks up a gun to fight for an ideal, there has always been the 
unspoken issue of who protects the writer who would not or cannot stand up in 
defence of the kind of society in which a writer can live and work. There are, for 
that matter, Nigerian writers who have insisted almost in consonance with apostles 
of military diarchy in the sphere of partisan politics that a rapprochement with 
dictatorships should be pursued by writers as a means of fulfilling at least one 
social imperative: the building of consensus in society. This happens to be a different 
demand from that which retorts that since a writer may not be able to escape the 
implications of government policies as it affects literature, the writer would have 
to interact with the government as part of the larger society. The idea of a 
rapproachment becomes something else when it is viewed as a means to a consensus 
between such radically opposed catchments of society as those on the side of free 
speech and association as against those on the side of dictatorial fiat and decreed 
unfreedom. To demand such a rapprochement is no different from taking up a gun 
against or submitting to bad governors. Both methods, taking up a gun as Okigbo 
d.d or workmg for a rapprochement with dictatorship as Nigerian writers are urged 
to do ,s a resort to brokerage techniques outside the ken of literature One writer 
becomes an ambassador for the opposition a n d t h e o f h e r b u | | d s hemen, 
w,th rn.Mary d,ctatorshiPs. Each is a case of political choice being embossed. They 
^ g obeacknowlegedforwhattheyare.Theyarechoicesthatcitizenscanmake 
whethe they are wnters, soldiers or mechanics. Clearly, it is difficult to see how 
icatorsto t T 7 ' " ™ ^ -PP-hement with military 
dctator h,p,nto choices confronting a j o u r n a | i s t de,a,ned for reporting the seizurl 
of novels from vendors or iournalists who, for reporting a coup trial, are jailed fo 
hfeas accessor after the fact'of treason. The distinction between t h w L a 
wnterandthe wr.er as citizen becomes truly academic in the circumstance 
" * * of WoleSoyinko is not the only option, ,,or me m< 
important point to make in a society where 'exit' i. ™t ,u ! " 
an alternative to acquiescence or c o l b o r o i o nB i e. 7 " ^ ^ ' ^ °$ 
perhaps need to bear the point in mind Q '" e x t r e m e ^ t i o n s 
thatco'uld d,sP,ace the C ^ ^ T ^ T T r ^ '" °C^ 
smceSoyinka has not ^ S ^ ^ " ^ 
an admirable capacity to sustain the volume andI £ 0 ^ h 
? 
spite of his activism, Ben Okri's admonition ^ 1 L " * terary C r e a t i v i t y m 
obvious: that some writers are i 
True, the categoric confrontation between on 
activism like Soyinka's gives rise to m n PP° S e d f ° r c e s w h i c h Po l i t ical 
of the days 7 c 6 ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ oreturn,o,hefortressed world 
behemoths, imperatives, and monoloaic Hi. C ° C W O r " ' S a w o r l d of warfare, 
9 dlSC0UrSes' ^ ' e unpopular in the hyped 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vol. 2/No. 3
rcalism of the post-cold war era. It implies an interface between at least two differing 
' ° n s of social organisation: between the armed and repressive and the unarmed 
S' O r > . l t brings home to all the difficulty of distancing literature from the environment 
X<v'~>ich it is produced. The writer as a chooser in the context of military dictatorship, 
l r nP>ly must confront, within or outside his writings, the spectacle of living in a world that 
' ^ds between a post-cold war and post-apartheid culture of democratisation and a 
' S y r i a n maelstrom which is actively de-pluralising even as the soldiers go from one 
' ess transition to another. Writers who invest their talents in exploring such worlds 
c h the rest of the world may now consider to be too inside history, too 
P a r t'Cularistic, in the age of Fukyama's'end of history' may well kill off the outhor by 
e9Qting him and her to a ghetto. Those who must escape death in the ghetto, as 
s S 6©ms, must rise towards a more or less rootless universalism as many writers indeed 
a r e Opting for as a means of exiting from ghettoisation which, wrongly in my view, 
l s Prefigured as the lot of the writer who is over-identified with Africa and African 
P r ° b | e m s While, for some, the exit resides in a depoliticised literature, whatever that 
ffl6QnSi for others it is naturalism or realism against which a distancing must be 
C o risumated. Thus, magical realism, some form of metaphysical picaresque tends to 
vQlorised, at least in theory, as a universal idiom that could help that distancing. 
Unlike an earlier generation represented by Peter Abraham, Sembene 
° U s r n a n e , Wole Soyinka, Flora Nwapa, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi Wa Thiong'o and 
B e s s i e Head and others who made their 'universal' mark by laying claim to Africa 
a n d even going as far as making implausible claims to ethnic imperatives as a means 
o f authenticating their Africanness, the temptation is to have recourse to a new 
'univer s a | j t y ' : a universality from a polar extreme that does not look at the rest of the 
w ° H d from Africa; it looks to Africa from the kingdom of the Written Word. Charity, 
it seems to say, begins from the kingdom of the text, a positioning which could help 
a Writer to dispense with worry about problems of community and rationality. Except 
t h a t in a world situation in which the politics of identity wrong-foots every claim to 
universality, the question always arises: whose text? 
This question may find the Moroccan Ben Jelloun the 1987 winner of the Prix 
Goncourt Prize or the Nigerian Ben Okri, the 1991 winner of the Booker Prize 
appearing as'not an African1 writer Yet, they still may not be European in the manner 
of, say, Martin Amis or Albert Camus. They are forced by the logic of nationality and 
market forces or the logic of nationality in market forces, to have to be located within 
a 'pre-texf that mobilises bias in the relationship between texts. This is the point at 
w h i c h the future of the African writer and of the literature exacts a peculiar logic of 
its o w n It is the logic of living in the world as ,. is, not as we would want it to be. It 
is a logic which essentially constrains and reminds the writer that individual gen.us 
may be free to roam where it lists but it must ,n the end be tied to the freedom of the 
environment Where the freedom of the community ,s |eopardised, as the case of many 
A f r i c a n societies show, individual genius must sooner or later suffer stasis or regress. 
In t h i s realisation lies the value of performances in our literature such as Ken Saro 
W i w a ' s which intervene within the possibility of affecting reality outside the text, 
m a k i n g things new, spelling, ultimately, the freedom of the writer as the freedom to be 
p a r t o f a community in which it is possible to lead a healthy life a, a writer, that freedom 
s u r e l y covers the freedom to write about genocide and biocid. as well as awakening 
of t h e community to resist that which makes trivia of their lives. GR 
African Quarterly 
on the Arts 
Vnl 2/No. 3 GLENPORA