The Sun News Online | How I write

Like many of his fellow scholars who left the shores of Nigeria for brighter prospects overseas during the Abacha days, Professor Harry Garuba could not resist the offer in South Africa in the 1990s. despite the highly stimulating intellectual environment at Nigeria’s premier university (University of Ibadan) Garuba who was senior lectuer in the English Department was fed up with the days of Sani Abacha which turned the country into a cesspit of dictatorship.

He could no longer withstand incessant closures and industrial actions which made mess of the academic environment.

Today, Garuba is professor of English (African literature) at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He was recently invited to Nigeria to deliver a keynote address at the maiden lecture organized by the Wole Soyinka Award Committee for Investigative Journalism in Lagos. He also took time to speak to Daily Sun on his sojourn abroad, noting, however, that he still misses the highly creative and dynamic academic and social environments in Nigeria.

Some years back, you left Nigeria for South Africa. Now you are a professor at the University of Cape Town, how would you describe your stay in that country?
At the time I left, the condition of academic life in Nigeria was not very good. This were Abacha years when universities were closed. So it was an opportunity for me to get back to serious intellectual work on a regular basis, rather than intermittently. And in that sense, it’s been quite fruitful.

I had a better environment to do academic work. But definitely I have really missed U.I. I was lucky to have been in U.I. at a time when it was extremely intellectually exciting and there was a lot of intellectual engagements from seminars to workshops, staff club, to students union buttery. Also there was quite an academic community that was meeting regularly and really doing great work so it was really a pity that this tradition got so dissipated during the Abacha years.

Compared to the Abacha years in Nigeria, what environment did you meet in South Africa?
Quite frankly, the first university where I worked -University of Zululand-is one of the historically black universities and I must say that the level of academic work there was not very high, having just left U.I. then it was a big step down in terms of students academic abilities and the academic environment in general. But later I went to the University of Cape Town which is a much better resource university with higher quality of students. So the environment became much better and more challenging for me academically.

There was the era of great writers like Dennis Brutus, Albert Camus, Richard Wright and others in South Africa, How would you describe the literary scene compared to what obtains in Nigeria now?
The literary environment during the apartheid years was largely conditioned by the circumstances of apartheid, so there was this writing that was generally labeled protest literature. But since the end of apartheid, there’s been new kind of writings about questioning identities -literature in transition in which people are identifying legends and trends. But again I don’t think it has coalesced into any definitive literature at this stage. What is however clear is that writers have been liberated from an obsessive concern with issues of racial discrimination.

With the fall of apartheid, there was a very influential essay on S.A cultural life written by Njabulo Ndebele and titled The Rediscovery of the Ordinary. The book was written towards the end of apartheid years in the 1980s. his claim in that essay is the SA writing was so schematic, that is only centred on hero-villain-white-black culture, that it depended so much on spectacle as a career of messages.

He claims that what S.A writing needed to move forward was to rediscover the power of the ordinary. And in a sense, more S.A. writing can besaid to be engaged with the ordinary.

As a Nigerian scholar and writer, how have you impacted on the people and literary community in S.A.
My experience from Nigeria has been tremendously influential in SA-first there is the fact that most South Africans were not aware of writing outside of South Africa. Of course, that was the legacy of the apartheid years and making students aware of the robust intellectual and creative tradition outside of Southern Africa has been immensely fulfilling for me and the students. For example, when Things Fall Apart was being taught in syllabuses of various universities, it was clear that those who taught it did not emphasize on the cultural knowledge that I would want to play on as a Nigerian lecturer in S.A.

What improvement has attended your creative career?
I must say that I’ve not been doing much of creative writing. I have been doing few pieces of poetry (writing) but I’ve not been able to bring these together in form of a collection.
I have really been mostly engaged in critical work and I expect that from next year I’ll begin to put together a volume of poetry and see how it is received after this long period of break -since 1998.
Nigeria/SA-issue of crime, social life, etc.

I don’t think crime or the volume of it is what the problem is, but the violence that accompanies the crime is the major problem. We don’t find the kind of gratuitous violence that we see in SA in other places.
For example, in SA, people get killed for as little as a cell phone set or a small amount of money. The reason for this is the general availability of guns which is a legacy of the country’s apartheid history. Guns became freely available in the period of the struggle.

So one of the strange experiences I’ve had is to find taxi drivers having guns in their cars. All these have added to the level of violence. Again, it’s so easy to obtain licenses to own guns as long as oe can prove you don’t have a police record and that you have taken some training in shooting. But then, there’s a lot of illegal arms because on many occasions while walking along the streets of Johannesbourg people offer me guns to buy at very cheap rates. This is the biggest problem.

There are the usual hot spots where one needs to avoid but apart from these spots, one would be surprised that most of the violence in SA happen in the communities-meaning that the conflicts are within the communities themselves.

Concerning rape, there’s a high level of it but the issue of inter-racial rape is very low-rather it happens often among people who know one another. And so it is not exactly as racialised as people think and it’s not as random as people think.

With KORA Awards and other entertainment outlets, how prominent or popular is entertainment world is SA, compared to Nigeria.

Actually SA boasts of infrastructure for business. This is not to say that there’s too much support of entertainment by the state-in fact, one of the reasons-economic pressures that contributed to the end of apartheid is that the business community felt they were being hedged in-there came freedom for the business class that allowed them to move outside of the country.

Also the economic pressure liberated a lot of capital to move and penetrated other parts of Africa.

Nigeria seems to have more talents in the literary and entertainment world but SA looks like it’s more developed and more aggressive in these areas why?
This is because Nigeria doesn’t have he infrastructure that can support entertainment. Also, SA are more outward looking in terms of packaging their entertainment. In Nigeria, with a large population,we can thrive economically on an internal audience, so we are not in the habit of trying to package our entertainment for the external audience.

What propels you to write as a writer?
I suppose the creative urge makes me to write. I also believe that everybody has the creative potential, but that people deploy that potential in different ways. This is because every creative effort-dance, music, etc are better experienced in the literature/writing than any other way. For most people, their creative imagination comes out in song, music and others, mine is centred on the use of words.

Why did you chose poetry as a creative expression?
There are certain emotions and experiences that are so intense that only poetry can capture as different from the prose that explores more time and space-poetry tries to capture the moment in its intensity, so that was appealing to me.

Target audience
As a poet, I believe if one tries to put the message before the medium, one is likely to write a very bad poem. So I think the whole efforts starts from the inspiration and experiences that one tries to depict. And as every writer tries to make meaning out of experience, so also it is important to put the message across or try to create out of the medium which actually comes first.

What then is your muse?
My cultural experiences have always influenced what I write. But I also rely mostly on inspiration on which I may not know where it comes from or what shape it takes.

Role of writer to change society
In the third world, the writer inevitably becomes the voice of the nation and this originated from the history of colonization. So writers are expected to play an emancipatory role in public sphere. In Europe and America, the writer don’t have to play that role. For example, it may be needless today to ask an American sport-now it doesn’t make sense, but in Africa, owing to our historical experience, the writer is expected to give voice to some kind of national spirit, emotion, mood and to contribute basically to teaching, according to Achebe, in the wide sense and not by slogan.

Reflections on my 50th birthday
What is good about getting to 50 is that it allows me to have perspectives on things that I never had before. Bernard Shaw said age actually doesn’t make man grow wiser because he knew of some old people who are still foolish. But what age gives one experiences which are irreplaceable. These experiences give one perspectives of life which one may not had as a young person. I think that is what aging gives man.

Nigerian democracy and the way forward
The major problem in Nigeria is the absence of infrastructure of economic, physical and social lives. If there’s a major improvement in these areas, I believe the situation would be better. I did tell people that before I left Nigeria, there were no cell phones, but it would be a wonderful experience if someone embarks on a study of how much cell phones has contributed to traffic discongestion in Lagos.
This is because when I was in Nigeria, I would need to drive to certain places which I could now teach through the cell phone.

For prospective writers
First of all, I know the worse experience for young writers is getting their works rejected. But I always remind them that some of the greatest works of literature were once rejected by publishers and later got published. So they should nit mind the initial rejection by publishers.

Secondly, they should know that because writing is hard work, they have to read widely and know what other writers are doing.