“Other voices, other rooms:” notes on the production of Africanist scholarship in Africa and in the global north

Abstract

Two starting points for the paper are a summary account of the accomplishments of Bernth Lindfors, whose career is seen as achieving a symbiosis between work on African literary scholarship done in the global north and in parts of Africa, and a paper by Carli Coetzee on journal work in African literary studies as, ideally, ethical labor. The title of the article by Coetzee referencing the “air-conditioned room” prompts the title of the present paper (with a nod to Truman Capote’s title, which I borrow) and provides the impetus for a consideration of the production of academic journals in Africa. African literary scholarship stands to gain from regional and continental exchanges and partnerships made on a more even footing than the conventional north-south divide currently allows for. Although not without controversy, Lindfors attempted to undo the material and other inequities implied in Coetzee’s title, to facilitate other voices, and provide wider access to multiple spaces of Anglophone African literature.

Keywords:

• Symbiosis
• epistemology
• critical theory
• journal publication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Lindfors’s account of these early years in Africa contain some startling recollections from a past barely imaginable now, such as the following: “Anyone living in East Africa in those days who had been associated with [Makerere] university was entitled to borrow books from [the library] by mail” (African Literary Manuscripts 8).

2 A term that must be used with caution, since in many ‘Anglophone’ African countries, although English is an official language, its use is not widespread, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has discussed extensively—a situation that is, of course, socially divisive.

3 Now part of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN).

4 Personal communication, April 30, 2020.

5 I am grateful to Bernth Lindfors for allowing me to cite from his manuscript.

6 While universities in South Africa and Botswana operate under some constraints, their situation is not as critical as that, for example, of practically any university in West Africa.

7 The present writer has recently published a paper on the use of invective in election rally songs from Lesotho and Nigeria. A question that has arisen is to what extent is it appropriate to apply to the texts analyzed a theoretical framework and vocabulary drawn from northern models such as rhetoric studies and the work of the British practitioners of discourse analysis, Stephen Toulmin and Norman Fairclough. But the analytical procedures involved are fairly broad—universal, one might say—and in any case the contrary question arises, given the vastly different histories and traditions of thought and faith of northern Nigeria and Lesotho, which alternative epistemology might one employ?

8 David Atwell was involved in negotiating the transference of Lindfors’s library to the University of Natal in Pietermaritzburg, and the creation of the Centre for African Literary Studies (CALS) there. The idea that Atwell presented to the university was to create a resource in Africa that was sizeable enough to change the direction of travel for scholars based in Africa.

9 It seems absurd to discuss Lindfors’s contribution to African literary scholarship without mentioning his extraordinary list of published writings, but those are not the focus of this paper. Suffice to say that, in the context of the dwindling resources mentioned above, his BALE series (bibliographies of Black African Literature in English) have constituted an invaluable research tool. The range of Lindfors’s essays, taking in archival work, personal recollections of work and friendship with African writers, as well as literary criticism, is very well showcased in his 2020 publication, African Literary Manuscripts and African Archives.

10 Lindfors comments on “what Kole Omotoso once called the ‘Abiku complex’ in African journal publishing, comparing the evanescent nature of these publications to that of spirit children who live awhile, then die young and get reborn, usually to the same cursed mother” (African Literary Manuscripts and African Archives 18). One could add that those “mothers” could not always provide the nourishment a young child needs to survive.

11 At least two members of staff at southern African universities were dismissed in the 2000s, in part for engaging in this kind of scam. Even a cursory internet search will reveal these journals for what they are, as they often make insupportable claims, for example, to be published by an institution that has no record of their existence.

12 A short film on the WSI—Na le Uena—is accessible on the Internet. This was produced not as a documentary, but as a promotional video for fund-raising purposes. Consequently it gives only a sketchy idea of the WSI methodology, but it leaves one in no doubt about the exhilaration felt by workshop participants.

13 CD notes: as the body of this paper suggests, although (i) the establishment of joint research projects between geographically scattered colleagues and (ii) access to journals within Africa are still problematic, basic communication is vastly improved due to the advent of electronic mail (though see the caveats recorded by Olaniyan, noted above). Scholars whose work has been carried out exclusively in the West may not realize how great a boon it is to be liberated from an outfit such as the Nigerian Postal Disservice.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chris Dunton

Chris Dunton was born in the UK and educated at the University of Oxford, where he took his BA and PhD degrees. He has worked at universities in Nigeria, Libya and South Africa, and as a cultural journalist in Cameroon and Peru. He is at present Professor of Literature in English at the National University of Lesotho. Amongst his publications are three books on Nigerian theater, a forthcoming critical biography of the Cameroonian novelist Ferdinand Oyono, and (with Mai Palmberg) Human Rights and Homosexuality in southern Africa. He has also published a collection of short stories, Boxing (African Books Collective).

David Attwell

David Attwell is Emeritus Professor, University of York, and Extraordinary Profesor, University of the Western Cape. David Atwell’s publications include two monographs on J.M. Coetzee, the more recent being J.M. Coetzee and the Life of Writing (2015) which was a Finalist for the Alan Paton Prize, South Africa’s premier award for nonfiction. Rewriting Modernity (2005/6) is his collection of studies of African writers in southern Africa from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. With Derek Attridge he co-edited The Cambridge History of South African Literature (2012).