What
hope for indigenous African literatures?
By TOLU OGUNLESI
Sunday,
December 2, 2007
Language and literature have always had a tempestuous relationship
with regards to the African continent. I participated in the
Beyond Borders Festival of African Literature, organized by
the British Council, in Kampala, Uganda, in 2005, and I remember
a participant at one of the colloquia commenting that it was
inappropriate to label the festival one on African literature,
when only the Anglophone subset of the African Continent was
involved. In other words, it should have been tagged a Festival
of Anglophone African Writing.
This leads to the over-flogged issue of homogeneity. True,
there is an African continent, bounded by the Atlantic and
Indian oceans, the Suez Canal, Red Sea and the Mediterranean,
and ranging from the sweltering deserts of the North to the
Mangrove Swamps of Southern Nigeria to the savannah plains
of Southern/Eastern Africa. But when you add to this geographical
monstrosity a historical layer of foreign conquest (Colonialism,
The Scramble), plus the inferiority complex that comes as
a side-effect from centuries of slavery and of a sort of lagging
behind in industrial, political and technological advancement,
what you get is a seemingly irredeemable conundrum. An Africa
that questions its own existence. An Africa pregnant with
a question mark.
Language is both an end in itself (as a signifier/characteristic
of culture, identity, tribal or national pride) and a means
to an end (as a means of communication). The scramble for
Africa, colonialism, misrule (leading to widespread illiteracy)
and the harsh, winner-takes-all weather of globalization have,
at different times, or perhaps as different faces of a single
monolith, conspired to make survival difficult for African
languages on all levels.
And there is the problem of staggering multiplicity of language
as well. It is popularly touted that Nigeria has as many as
two hundred and fifty ethnic groups, each of which can lay
claim to their own language, or dialect at least. However,
Dr. Uwe Seibert of the Department of Languages and Linguistics,
University of Jos, has compiled a list of almost five hundred.
Wikipedia, the online resource gives a figure of 521, made
up of 510 living languages, two second languages without native
speakers and 9 extinct languages.
Since the 1960s there has been a clamour by groups of African
intellectuals for African Indigenous Languages (and by implication,
Literatures) to be given preeminence above colonial languages,
as a means of curtailing neocolonialism, and ensuring that
Africa asserts itself in a globalized world. Ngugi wa Thiong’o
is one of those in the forefront of this. He, for example,
has chosen to write and publish his novels in his native Gikuyu
language.
Megan Behrent, in an essay (a honours thesis), Ama Ata Aidoo:
The Language Question (Brown University 1997), noted:
The Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o argues that to rid African
literature of the legacy of colonialism, African writers must
begin writing in their native languages and that literature
written by Africans in a colonial language is not African
literature, but "Afro-European literature." He argues
that using European languages inherently makes African literature,
the literature of an elite class of Africans ("Right
from its conception it was a literature of the petty-bourgeoisie
born of the colonial schools and universities.
It could not be otherwise, given the linguistic medium of
its message.") which cannot relate to the majority of
African peoples who do not necessarily speak or read European
languages, but rather speak a variety of indigenous African
languages.
Here, Ngugi is defining African Literatures as literatures
that avoid colonial languages and instead settle for indigenous
African languages. In other words, African Literatures are
all about African Languages. Which is certainly a more acceptable
definition than one that presumes or prescribes that African
Literature is a literature that features scheming tortoises,
stupid lions, evil step-mothers, suitor-seeking princesses,
and mermaids masquerading as pretty girls.
Unfortunately, the very simple question – “How
many of Ngugi’s s so-called African kinsmen does he
hope to communicate with through his writings in Gikuyu? –
deals a heavy blow to Ngugi’s fervently propagated,
and admittedly admirable pro-African language stance.
The question that readily comes to mind is: if English or
even French succeeds in converting African Literature into
the literature of an elite class, would Gikuyu, or Yoruba,
or Swahili be an effective de-elitising tool?
The solution, one would argue, would be to evolve a truly
African language. And then another question would arise: How
do we evolve a common language that everyone, from Arab to
Zulu, can identify with? In Nigeria, for example, there have
been attempts to create an indigenous national language (Wazobia),
but this has not proved very fruitful.
Chinua Achebe, I think, answers the question of whether to
write in English or not best: "It doesn't matter what
language you write in, as long as what you write is good …
Language is a weapon, and we use it... There's no point in
fighting a language."2
One must, for the purposes of this consideration, separate
African languages into its verbal and textual components.
As orature, most African languages, in my opinion, are not
in any immediate danger, the many-pronged assault on them
notwithstanding. (I remember my days in secondary school,
where we paid fines for using vernacular. Yoruba, our native
language, was reduced to an anthropological specimen, to be
analysed and taught and experimented and absorbed only within
the confines of Yoruba Class. I am not sure what the purpose
of those elementary Yoruba classes were, other than to provide
some form of indigenization in the curriculum.)
It is true that a few languages have perished, and more are
in danger of doing so, but generally speaking, African languages,
as orature, are alive and well. But as written word / text,
languages of the African continent have never had it good.
I attribute this to the following (certainly not an exclusive
list):
•The fact that English remains the medium of instruction
in our schools, and indigenous languages remain confined to
curriculum-fulfilling specimens.
•The appalling level of literacy on the continent, which
means that many people cannot read in ANY language whatsoever.
•The pervasive influence of English as the linguistic
medium for satellite television and the internet.
•The often poor quality of programming content (movies,
TV, radio) in indigenous languages, which puts off a significant
part of any potential audience.
•The problem of converting African languages (which
are often composed of clusters of dialects of wildly varying
uniformity) onto the page. It is for this reason, for example,
that Chinua Achebe has refused to allow an Igbo translation
of Things Fall Apart. Below is Susan Gallagher's account of
what has come to be known as the Union Igbo debacle:
When someone asked if Things Fall Apart had ever been translated
into Igbo, Achebe's mother tongue, he shook his head and explained
that Igbo exists in numerous dialects, differing from village
to village. Formal, standardized, written Igbo – like
many other African languages – came into being as a
result of the Christian missionaries' desire to translate
the Bible into indigenous tongues. Unfortunately, when the
Christian Missionary Society tackled Igbo,...they brought
together six Igbo converts, each from a different location,
each speaking a different dialect."
The resulting 'Union Igbo' bore little relationship to any
of the six dialects “– a strange hodge-podge with
no linguistic elegance, natural rhythm or oral authenticity"
– yet the missionaries authorized it as the official
written form of the Igbo languages. Achebe would not consent
to have his novel translated into this "linguistic travesty"
Union Igbo. "Consequently, one of the world's great novels,
which has been translated into more than 30 languages, is
unable to appear in the language of the very culture that
it celebrates and mourns.
•Tolu Ogunlesi is a Lagos-based poet.
(To be continued) |
