Peter Abrahams and the Bandung Era: Afro-Asian Routes of Connection

ABSTRACT

This paper reads Peter Abrahams’ writings on Africanness in the context of exchanges between anti-colonial thinkers in the Bandung era, spanning the period from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s. It examines the output of the Afro-Asiatic Writer’s Association (AAWU) through Lotus, a quarterly journal that brought together work by artists and thinkers such as Abrahams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Yahya Haqqi, Breyten Breytenbach, Ousman Sembene, Chinua Achebe, and Thu Bon, among others. Abrahams’ contributions to Lotus, among his other writings, reflect on the transnational by yoking cultural production and politico-economic conditions. In doing so, Abrahams insists on constructing the transnational through models of solidarity that unsettle self–other binaries and attempt to map cultural as well as financial capital along a South–South axis. He highlights problems with modernity and its cultures that are particularly productive to explore as we grapple with notions of transnationalism. Abrahams reminds us of the importance of attending to race relations as well as imperial relations by examining the economic disparities they involve instead of approaching them as abstracted romances of a black homeland or of an exotic Africanness.

KEYWORDS:

• Peter Abrahams
• Lotus
• Afro-Asian Writers Association
• South–South solidarity
• globalization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Bolsonaro thus conveniently shifts the blame for this ecological disaster on to outsiders and avoids taking responsibility for the consequences of his policies. He steers the conversation away from the most immediate victims of the fires, the indigenous tribes whose way of life is threatened by the fires and by Bolsonaro’s larger policies, which weaken environmental protections in Brazil.

2 I have in mind here some of the more recent scholarship on Abrahams in a transnational context such as Shane Graham’s (2013) “Black Atlantic Literature as Transnational Cultural Space”. For a more in-depth discussion of transnational Indian Ocean studies see Gaurav Desai’s (2013) Commerce with the Universe and Laura Chrisman’s (2005) “Beyond Black Atlantic and Postcolonial Studies” for a discussion of the pitfalls of the “Black Atlantic”. For an earlier step toward a transnational perspective that complicates essentialist narratives see David Scott’s (1999) Refashioning Futures.

3 See Vijay Prashad’s (2007)The Darker Nations and Making a World After Empire, edited by Christopher J. Lee for a more extensive discussion of the Bandung era and its legacies.

4 This list of goals (or a very similar one) appears in most of the issues from the 1970s on.

5 Some of the early English language issues were in fact printed in Cairo by the “U.A.R. Publishing House” and others lack a clear indication of where they were published. While it is difficult to tell exactly when the responsibility for printing the English issues was turned over to Dewag Verlag Berlin publishing house in the GDR, the January issue of 1974 features the first use of what would become the standard format of indicating the name of the publishing house.

6 Mursi Saad al-Din (2006).

7 While the composition of the editorial board was occasionally altered, these names appear most consistently in the journal during the time of Abrahams’ participation.

8 Abrahams’ description of the impersonal, cold nature of the mammy trader recalls Selina’s reaction to Udomo’s betrayal in A Wreath for Udomo as well as the glazed, impersonal eyes of the tribal men who kill Udomo at the end of the novel. In his wonderful reading of the novel, George Olakunle sees Udomo as both a victim and a villain suggesting that the tribesmen were perhaps justified in killing him; he argues that Udomo’s friend, Mabi, represents the noble artist-humanist who steers clear of dirtying his hands in politics and is politically ineffectual. What is interesting about Abrahams’ description of the mammy traders is that it insists on her right to a cold, impersonal gaze and moves beyond the simile of the African mask to the space where the artist/narrator/Abrahams can in fact engage in a political conversation. In other words, the artist here is engaged and not at all outside the sphere of politics—it is just a question of how the artist enters into this sphere. Abrahams’ answer seems to be that the artist must enter this sphere through dialogue.

9 Abrahams and Richard Wright met in Paris where they struck up a friendship. The two men maintained a correspondence in subsequent years. In The Black Experience Abrahams recounts how he defended Wright when James Baldwin published his scathing review of Native Son. Abrahams’ criticism of Wright in the Lotus article seems to be a response to the American author’s disappointment that Africa did not conform to his idea of the place.

10 In fact, Abrahams seems to adopt an even kinder view of Kenyatta and the Mau Mau in his interview with Hopeton Dunn, emphasizing that Kenyatta was the victim of a Britishsmear campaign (2011, 507).

11 While Abrahams may have critiqued aspects of different welfare systems, he remained a firm believer in the value of and need for the Welfare State. His position stands in sharp contrast to that of a contemporary such as Kwame Nkrumah who argued in his book on neocolonialism that the Welfare State was funded by the colonial earnings of the upper classes in Europe.