Since its birth in Chicago in 1974 and its inaugural conference at the University of Texas at Austin in 1975, the African Literature Association has relied on bids from its members to host ALA annual meetings on their college campuses. The 44th annual meeting of the ALA on the Environments of African Literature, held in Washington, DC at the Marriott Wardman Park from May 23 to 26, was a historic milestone in the life of the association. For the first time, the ALA did not have to rely on its membership to host a meeting. After years of planning, 2018 was the turning point when the ALA finally took charge of organizing its annual meetings.1
We live in the Anthropocene—the age of humans—an epoch when humans have fundamentally altered earth system processes and are continually reshaping our planet. It is therefore fitting that in calling attention to the Environments of African Literature, the 2018 conference invited participants in its call for papers to address the multiple environments—physical, institutional, ideological, symbolic, discursive, cultural, and technological (among others)—that affect the production, the dissemination, and the reception of African literature. Further, the ALA solicited papers which addressed ways in which African literary texts reflect on such environments and the challenges and promises they present. It is also worth noting that ALA members around the world belong to professional associations dedicated to the study of literature, visual arts, and culture. In keeping with this long tradition at the ALA where our understanding of the literary is capacious, papers on music, dance, performance, theater, film, art, and other media were equally welcome.2
One such long standing tradition is aptly captured in Cilas Kemedjio’s Presidential address, “In Praise of My Mentors and Mentees” (printed in this volume). Cilas’s address is a heartwarming account of a 27-year relationship with ALA members who have been both his mentors and his mentees. This relationship that began while he was a graduate student and has lasted through his becoming the current president of the ALA speaks to a mentoring tradition that is generational, enduring, and one that can only strengthen the ever-growing community of students and scholars of the ALA.
The articles selected for publication in this special issue3 begin with Astrid Starck-Adler’s essay on the environmental art of South African sculptor Andries Botha whose life size elephant sculptures (and bronzes of historical figures), all made from recycled materials, have been celebrated as messengers of Botha’s engagement with ecology and the environment. “Andries Botha et ‘Human Elephant’: Sculpture et écologie,” delves into the strong reactions in Durban, South Africa, to the three elephant sculptures Botha placed at Warwick Junction up to and including their destruction. However, those reactions also generated conversations that led to something remarkable: the elephants being taken care of and brought back to “life.” Starck-Adler questions why Botha’s environmental art has escaped recent scholarly inquiry and notes that the Durban event was a magnificent example of the public’s spontaneous and creative interaction with a seemingly abandoned work, its truly “humane” appropriation and the putting into social practice of its ecological aim. Ernest Cole’s, “Conflict Diamonds at the intersection of Human Desire and Action in the Sierra Leone Civil War: A Historical and Literary Perspective,” furthers this theme with a critical look at the crucial role of diamonds in the politics of Sierra Leone and how its connections to power and hegemony makes it a potential source of conflict. Cole notes that different stages in the exploration of diamonds have shaped the social and political development of Sierra Leone, its literature and other aesthetic works. Given that the history of Sierra Leone cannot be fully understood without reference to the connections between diamonds and politics, Cole argues that the literature of Sierra Leone depicts the ambivalence of diamonds both as a curse and a blessing that engenders a metonymic representation of a disfigured body politic and makes the case for using bodily injury as metaphor of a traumatized nation. Cole contends that post-war writers are using literature to address the psychological consequences of the atrocities committed during the war to usher a new perspective in Sierra Leonean literature that focuses on trauma and disability as distinct from the construct of ambivalence that characterizes earlier forms of Sierra Leonean writing. Following the complex relationship between diamonds and politics in the previous essay is Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju examination of the relationship between Nigerian popular music and the Nigerian state. In “State Power, Postmodernist Identities and Conflicts in Nigerian Pop Music,” Oloruntoba-Oju specifically looks at how popular music engages with the politics of resistance and compliance and argues that music has played a significant role in helping to understand the complex intersections between culture and the Nigerian postcolonial state. He describes how, on the one hand, music attempts to transcend state-determined social barriers, but, on the other hand, in seeking financial legitimacy, paradoxically functions as a conveyor belt for State determined consciousness, thus mapping the complex meanings of popular music within the matrix of contemporary state power in an African postcolonial setting. Another African postcolonial setting takes us from Nigeria to Cameroon with Arnaud Tcheutou’s “L’hymne national du Cameroun: Un chant patriotique sans ancrage géo-identitaire” in which Tchetou questions the relationship between identity and space in Cameroon’s national anthem entitled: Ô Cameroun berceau de nos ancêtres [O Cameroon, Thou Cradle of our Fathers]. Can this “song-poem” composed in 1928 by the francophone students of the Fulasi Teachers’ Training School in the southern region of Cameroon in honor of the French colonial administrator, Marchand, and as such, in celebration of French colonialism, be considered part of Cameroon’s national literature? Tchetou argues that if a patriotic song should or is meant to represent a national symbol, the lyrics of Cameroon’s national anthem composed in honor of a French colonialist lack nationalist commitment and do not reflect the geographical and socio-cultural realities specific to the country or nation. He contends, however, that the English version composed by Bernard Fonlon in 1961 is immersed in Cameroonian geopolitics, and as such, captures its nationalist character.
Jennifer Leetsch directs our gaze away from the African continent to its diasporas with a look at “Ocean Imageries in Warsan Shire's Afro-Diasporic Poetry” where we encounter renditions of specifically located transoceanic trajectories which reach across various different water spaces—connecting the East African diaspora via the Northern Indian Ocean first to Northern Africa and the Middle East and from there via the Mediterranean to Europe. Leetsch places Somali-born Shire’s poetry within a triadic structure that forcefully speaks towards three different water spaces: the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and, less directly so, the Black Atlantic. Leetsch argues that the simultaneously violent and transformative potential of these three water spaces take root in Shire’s oceanic imaginaries and the ocean emerges as a troubled but enabling site of multiple exchanges, noting that Shire’s poetry constitutes the ocean not only as a deathly space, but also as generative: it offers up the possibilities of passage and movement, however dangerous they may be. Similarly, Catherine Ward’s “‘A false sister. A false foreigner’: Positionality, Sexuality, and Identity in Condé's Heremakhonon,” engages further the theme of migratory journeys that beget questions of the self with a look at how Maryse Condé’s Heremakhonon explores the effect spatial positioning has on identity through protagonist Veronica Mercier’s triangular migration as a cultural, linguistic, and sexual journey. Ward argues that counterintuitive to expectations of migration, Veronica’s journey is a privileged return, despite the presence of political chaos that often prompts forcible displacement. Ward unpacks the notion of home to explore the manner in which Veronica discovers that home and the associated power of ancestral roots are within, despite presumptions about home as place.
Gichingiri Ndigirigi’s “Discovering/Rediscovering ‘Home’ Through Ngũgĩ’s Early Works,” takes us on the author’s personal journey and exploration of the concept of home in Ngũgĩ’s work. Ngũgĩ’s early novels evoke three kinds of home for Ndigirigi: the hilly landscapes of The River Between, the repressive Emergency years in his home region of central Kenya in the 1950s, and the nationalist imaginary celebrated at the end of the liberation struggle. The River Between evoked familiar landscapes and foregrounded the issues the inhabitants had to negotiate in the early years of colonial contact. The specter of darkness descending in Weep not, Child captured the relatable trauma that still troubled the inhabitants of his village that had only recently emerged from the Emergency-era terror in the 1950s. Ndigirigi connects the major characters’ stoical belief in the sun rising to a traditional Gĩkũyũ worldview to a discussion of A Grain of Wheat where traditional notions of trauma witnessing complicate the traitor/hero binarism that, he contends, has clouded the analysis of Mugo and probes the coercive nationalism into which Kihika sucks him and the invented traditions that attempt to naturalize the idea of Kenya. Gichingiri concludes his reflections with what he describes as a “Prospero moment” that highlights the value of the Nairobi attempt at decolonizing the mind. Following this essay on the early works of one of the fathers of modern African literature is Ato Quayson’s critical explication of what has come to be known as modern African literature. Quayson notes in “Modern African Literary History: Nation-and-Narration, Orality, and Diaspora” that the main challenge of a literary history is to construct interrelated historical and rhetorical series but in such a way as not to make them individually autonomous but mutually illustrative of the shifts and changes in the two domains. He maintains there is a strong family resemblance between literary history and the history of ideas which makes an exercise such as the one he engages in especially fruitful as a way of reflecting upon the relationship between African letters and studies of Africa in general. Quayson’s essay thus introduces the main phases and emphases in African literary studies, one that is both historical and evaluative. The creative writer, Helon Habila, moves us beyond this historical and evaluative moment with his thoughts on what is at stake for the “The Future of African Literature.” Habila cautions that his “comments on the future of African writing are not meant as prescriptions or criticism of the current trend of African writing, they are merely observations and also something of a wish list, things I wish to see in our literature.” The ALA will no doubt accept Habila’s challenge as we continue to probe multiple wish lists in our critical engagements with the future of African literature, visual arts, and culture.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all the reviewers of this JALA special issue for taking the time to review the essays and for their invaluable feedback to the contributors whose works are published here (and to those whose works weren’t).
Notes
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi
Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi is distinguished professor of English and Comparative Literature at North Carolina State University where she is assistant dean for Diversity in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a past president of the African Literature Association and the author of Gender in African Women's Writing: Identity, Sexuality, and Difference, Your Madness, Not Mine: Stories of Cameroon and The Sacred Door and Other Stories. She co-edited Reflections: An Anthology of New Work by African Women Poets and has guest-edited special issues of scholarly journals. She writes fiction under the pen name Makuchi.
Notes
1 I served then as Immediate Past President and 2018 ALA Conference Liaison who coordinated the conference organizing committees, oversaw planning activities, and the general organization of the conference.
2 See africanlit.org for the complete ALA 2018 CFP.
3 Some of the material in this section is taken from the authors’ abstracts.