Versuch (!!!) einer historischen Darstellung der neo-afrikanischen Literatur
(ca. 1995)
Bereits 1967 schrieb ein damals noch fast unbekannter Wole SOYINKA für das Londoner TRANSCRIPTION Centre, Nr. 31, S. 12 (1967)
The south African writer has still the right to hope, and this prospect of a future yet uncompromised by failure on his own part, in his own right, is something which has lately ceased to exist for other African writers...
The stage at which we find ourselves now is the stage of disillusionment...the situation in Africa today is the same the world over, it is not one of those tragedies which come of isolated human failures, but the very collapse of humanity. ...the Angolan or South African writer either in exile or stretching out his last feeble twitsches before the inexorable maul of a desperate regime ends him...sees, and he
understands for the first time that given equal opportuinity the black tin-god a few thousand miles north of him would degrade and dehumanize his victim as capably as Vorster or Governor Wallace...
The myth of irrational nobility, of a racial essence that must come to the rescue of the white depravity has run ist full course. In fact, it never existed... The despair and anguish which is spreading a miasma over the continent must sooner or later engage the attention of the writer in his own society or else be boldly ignored...
But there can ne no further distractions with universal concerns Whose balm is spread on abstract wounds, not on the gaping yawns of black inhumanity. A concern with culture strengthens society, but not a concern with mythology. The artist has always functioned in African society as the record of mores and experience of his own society and as the voice of vision in his own time. It is time for him to respond to this essence of himself.
(vgl. Auch Frank Niger, New Myths , handschriftlich auf Seite 5, X 2)
viel später dann BIODUN JEYIFO und Niyi Osundare, wie auch Patrice Nganang…
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Wir halten jetzt die folgenden Stichworte fest:
Disillusionment
Collapse of humanity
Dehumanize
Myth
Despair
Aber auch:
“the writer must function again as a record of mores and a voice of vision.”
(vgl. dazu das Dorf Ayero in "Season of Anomy")
wichtigste:
“the myth of irrational nobility has run its full course.
A concern with culture, yes, but not with myth.”
Und dieses Engagement der Autoren hat dann einer von ihnen, wenn auch nicht ein Literat in literarischer Form zu verarbeiten versucht: Ali Mazrui, der Kulturhistoriker von der KiSwahili-Küste in Kenya in "The Trial of Christopher Okigbo", Heinemanns 1971, S. 69-70:
“In Okigbo, until the explosion of Ibo separatism, individualism and universalism were beautifully intertwined. He used to deny that he was an African poet. 'I am a poet', was his simple insistence. In 1964, he had become even more explicit. 'There is no African literature'. There is good writing and bad writing - that's all.'
Then came the great 'festival of Negro Art' in Dakar in 1966. It was a great cultural occasion for black people, and an excuse for some brilliant if synthetic devices of 'culturalisation'. There was also real art, deep in its meaning, hungry in its passion,
alive in compulsive communication. Who was Africa's great poet for the Fdestival`Christopher Okogbo was offered the first prize for poetry. A sense of admiration pervaded the climate of judgment...
But a startling pronouncement was made. Chris Okigbo had rejected the first prize for poetry awarded by the festival of Negro Arts. Why? His answer was once again that of that aggressive fanaticism of the paramount universalist. He had proclaimed, 'There is no such thing as negro art'.'
Im Prozess im 'After-Africa' , in dem der Dichter der Prozess gemacht werden soll, weil er die Kunst aufgab, um sich auf Seiten Biafras im Krieg zu engagieren, führt sein Verteidiger Hamisi zu Okigbos Verteidigung an:
"The writer in Africa, asserted Hamisi, needed to be socially committed if he was to be universally engaged.
As one African intellectual oce put it, social commitment was not to be confused with social conformity. When African regimes, like the Federal one, asked their writers to be concerned WITH THE NATION; IT WAS IMPORTANT TO REFRAIN FROM EQUATING national concern with political convenience. A writer could be committed by opposing the folly of his government, or the intolerance of his society. Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian playwright, had done precisely that when he expressed his reservations about his government's policies towards the Ibo."
Und dann wird SOYINKA als Zeuge der Verteidigung zitiert und zwar mit der zuvor von uns zitierten Passage "Poets have lately talen to gun-running..." (S. 89) (siehe früheres Blatt)
Mazru's Buch enthält auch den Hinweis auf Okigbos Engagement zusammen mit ACHEBE nach dessen Rückkehr in die Ostregion Nigerias bei Gründung eines Verlages, einer Zeitschrift...S. 125
SOYINKA beschreibt dies vordergründiger - oder auch nicht - so:
"...he (the writer) was in any case still blinded to the present by the recussitated splendours of the past. Where he is purged from the long deception and has begun to express new wisdoms, the gates of the preventive detention fortresses opened up and closed on him. He becomes an exile, impeccable in his dark suite in the offices of UNO or UNESCO, or resorts to new weapons of violence. Poets have lately taken to gun-running and others are accused of holding up radio stations. In several independent states the writer is part of some underground movement: one coup at least in Africa is reputed to have involved a novelist and a poet." (in: Writers engeament and exile, in Transition, Nr. 31, p.12-13)
"The African writer needs an urgent release from the fascination of the past. Of course, the past exists, thew real AfricaN CONSCIOUSness establishes this - the past exists now, this moment, it is coexistent in the present awareness. It clarifies the present and explains the future, but it is not a fleshpot for escapist indulgence...a historic vision is of necessity universal and any pretense to it must first accept the demand for a total reexamination of the whole phenomenon of humanity.
I regard it as dangerous because to what else can it lead but to the destruction of the will to action.”
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Hierher: Taban und "Frantz Fanon`s Uneven Ribs", p. 138-139
The bridges we used
Have been burnt for us;
The images we carved
Prished with the linens.
Naked we stood:
Dispossessed!
Ought we reclaim the lost?
Decide on what to possess?
Or forget possessions all?
Should we masquerade
Like other big shots?
Or throw out ditrectly
Big-Shotism from the ship heavy laden
With deadwood already?
Do we ransack African antiquity
For philosophic counterparts
And institutions as well
To show the world
We had ours too?
After all
All these things are social creations
Produced to satisfy needs
Dispensable when not in need
Without a tear shed
For more can yet be made.
Now that ours have been cast aground
Couldn't we mount
An assault unique
On schools of thought
And revolutionize
The Mind?
Unhampered with a past
We possess the chance
To see beyond screens of others.
By shaking the chain
At its weakest point
We stand to find
The fatal faults.
Halten wir fest aus dem TABAN Zitat: Shed no tears vor vanishing exotica
The seeds of discontent lie in generations past...
Oder nehmen wir AYI KWEI ARMAH und seinen Roman "The Beautiful ones are not yet born"
"How long will Africa be cursed with its leaders?There were men dying from the loss of hope, others were finding gaudy ways to enjoy power they did not have...These men who were to lead us out of despair, they came like men already grown fat and cynical with the eating of centuries of power that had never struggled for, old before they had been born into power, and ready only for the grave...Their brothers and their friends were merchants eating what was left in the teeth of the white men with their companies...How were these leaders to know that while they were climbing up to shit in their people's faces, their people had seen their arse holes and drawn away in disgusted laughter? " (S. 153-154)
"And yet these were the socialists of Africa, fat perfumed, soft with the ancestral softness of chiefs who had sold their people and celestially happy with the fruits of the trade...he felt like a stranger from a country that was very far away..."
(vgl. dazu SOYINKA in ‚Burden’)
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Wir hatten es also in dieser Zeit mit einer zugleich revolutionären und romantisierenden Phase in der Literatur zu tun. Der Ugander NTIRU hat dies etwa zur gleichen Zeit im EAST AFRICAN Journal (Oct. 1971, S. 27) so beschrieben:
"Right up to the dawn of African Independence there was a need to harness all the intellectual and creative manpower available to confront the colonialist first on the political and later the cultural front. The focus therefore was outward - aimed at exposing the atrocities of the colonial masters, and the history of these stretched as far back as the era of the slave trade. When the focus was inward, it was nostalgic, apologetic - hallowing the qualities of the Africans. To this phase belong the writings about ‘African Personality’. African Identity, African everything.
Philosophies like NEGRITUDE espoused and adhered to by Leopold Sedar Senghor, flourished in this period. It is in this period that African politicians and bureaucrats man the government machinery whose mechanics they do not know and whose dynamics they only know in secondary and counter-part capacity. African writing is outward in focus, still pushing the former masters in ist own small way, exploding myths, dispelling prejudices and affirming native competence, iniative and imagination.
To this phase belong the genuinely romantic works of L.S. Senghor, Aimé Césiare, Opkot p'bitek's ‘Song of Lawino’ and a number of poems invoking Rousseau's notion of the 'noble svage', the unadulterated native. There is a general glorification of the rural beauties and the simple life of ordinary people. To this era belong sentiments like:
"Heia for the royal Kailcedrate!
Heia for those who never invented anything
Those who hever explored anything
Those who never tamed anything
Those who have given themselves up to the essence of all things
Ignorant of surfaces but struck by the moment
Of all things free of the desire to tame
But familiar with the play of the world."
(Aus Aimé Césaire, Retour au pays natal, zitiert nach Penguin Ausgabe 1969, S. 21-22)
(siehe dazu auch Soyinka, in Burden, Original)
Dazu schreib James Ntiru:
"What better lullaby could there be? It is to this order of nostalgic sentimentalism that this defiant but false confidence belongs:
I do not know
How to keep the white man's time
My mother taught me
The way of the Acholi Children in our homestead
Do not sleep at fixe rimes;
When sleep comes
Into their head
They sleep
When sleep leaves their head
They wake up."
(Okot p'Bitel, Song of Lawino, EAPH, Nairobi 1971. S. 95-96)
Die afrikanische Dichtung, Poesie wie Prosa, in den Jahren unmittelbar vor und nach der Unabhängigkeit, sowohl im francophonen wie im anglophonen Afrika, war eine Dichtung der Selbstbehauptung, der kulturellen Selbstbehauptung, der nostalgischen, romantischen Verklärung der eigenen Geschichte. Die Poesie besang neu-romantisch die 'edlen Wilden`, es sangen die Salon-Revoluzzer aus Paris oder die Absolventen der London School of Economics.
Es entstand zu wesentlichen Teilen das, was man auch die
anthropologische Literatur nennt.
(Achebe...)
Der Roman war, wie Margaret Folarin in 'African Literature Today' (Nr. 5, The Novel in Africa - An additional Comment on Ayih Kwei Atmah's 'The Beautiful Ones are not yet born', S. 116-129) geschrieben hat:
“Realistisch und manchmal naturalistisch, mit der Kultivierung des 'African Image' beschäftigt, mit Hilfe einer vordergründigen, im Allgemeinen positiven Darstellung des alltäglichen Lebens und der Kultur in Afrika.“
Zu diesem Genre kann man das ganze Gros der afrikanischen Literatur der frühen sechziger Jahre zählen, auch die Romane Cyprian Ekwensis, Achebes, Nzekwus, Camara Layes. Romane, in denen die damalige Krankheit der afrikanischen Gesellschaft mit der gesunden afrikanischen Gesellschaft der guten alten Zeit vor den Weißen kontrastiert wird.
--- Exotik im wahrsten Sinne, populärwissenschaftlich-romanhaft
verbrämte Darstellung des guten alten Stammeslebens
--- für den ausländischen Markt. Wole spricht von den Geiern,
gemeint sind die europäischen Verleger, die sich auf jeden Afrikaner,
der nur einige Zeilen zu Papier brachte, stürzten,
--- Mitschuld für diesen falschen Weg, wenn man denn von
Schuld reden kann, hatte auch die europäische Kritik, in Afrika und
in Europa, die dies alles hochlobte; Schuld war aber auch das
Fehlen einer eigenen kritischen afrikanischen Tradition.
--- Denn schon früh gab es ja auch andere Schreiber, wie etwa
Wole Soyinka schon 1960. Der hatte ja schon zur afrikanischen
Unabhängigkeit mit seinem Theaterstück "Dance of the Forests"
und seinem kritischen Ton Aufsehen erregt.
Das für die Unabhängigkeit bestellte Theaterstück wurde
wieder abbestellt!
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Doch, hier bevor wir uns mit der erwachsenen, modernen Literatur beschäftigen, noch einmal zwei bereits zuvor zitierte Stimmen zu dieser Phase in der politischen und kulturellen Entwicklung.Zunächst ein kritisches Wort SOYINKAS,
dann ein Zitat aus einem Gedicht TABAN LO LIYONGS.
Der Schriftsteller in post-independence Africa - ein Rückblick
In seinem bereits erwähnten Artikel "The Writer in African States" veröffentlicht im Juni 1967, also nach der Erfahrung seines ersten Aufenthalts im Gefängnis (und nur kurze Zeit, bevor die veröffentlichende Zeitschrift TRANSITION" selbst verboten wurde), schrieb WOLE SOYINKA im Hinblick auf das"verführerische Experiment des Autoritarismus in den neuen Gesellschaften",in dem der Schriftsteller aufgerieben werde, rückblickend auf die Rolle, die die Schriftsteller in den ersten Jahren der Unabhängigkeit gespielt haben:
"The revolutionary mood in society is a particularly potent tyrant in this respect and since the writer is, at the very least, sensitive to mood, he respects the demand of the moment and effects his definition as a writer by an act of choice. And in the modern African state especially the position of the writer has been such that he is in fact the very prop of state machinery. Independence in every instance has meant and eregemcy pooling of every mental resource. The writer must, for the moment at least (he persuades himself) postpone that unique reflection on experience and events which is what makes a writer - and constitute himself into a part of that machinery that will actually shape events.
(Vgl. Bemerkungen Jahns weiter oben und nachfolgenden das totale Nein Taban Lo Liyongs zu dieser Selbstaufgabe).
„Let this impulse be clearly understood. The African writer found that he could not deny his society, he could, however, temporarily at least, deny himself. He therefore took his place in the new state as a privileged person, placed personally above the effects of the narrowness of vision which usually accompanies the impatience of new nations, African, European or Asian. He, the special eye and ear,
the special knowledge and response, lost even his re-creative consciousness which from time to time, left active and alert his creative work, might have demanded a re-examination of his own position. The background begins at the united opposition by the colonised to the external tyrrant. Victory came of sorts, and the writer submitted his integrity to the monolithic stresses of the times. For this any manifesto seemed valid, any -ism could be embraced in clean conscience. With few exceptions the writer directed his energies to enshrining victory, to re-affirming his identification with the aspirations of nationalism and the stabilisation of society.
...reality, the ever-present fertile reality was ignored by the writer and resigned to the new visionary - the politicians. Cultural definitions became a new source of literature - not so new in fact, but these acquired a new significance in the context of political independence.
The curiosity of the outside world far exceeded their critical faculties and publishers hovered like benevolent vultures on the still foetus of the African Muse. At a given signal they tore off bits and pieces, fanned up with powerful wings delusions of significance in commonness and banality. The average published writer in the first few years of the post-colonial era was the most celebrated skin of inconsequence ever to obscure the true flesh of the African dilemma...
He even tried to give society something that the society had never lost - its IDENTITY:...he was content to turn his eye backwards in time and prospect in archaic fields for forgotten gems which would dazzle and discredit the present. But never inwards, never truely into the present, never into the obvious symptoms of the niggling, warning predictable present from which alone lay the salvation of ideals...
He was in any case still blinded to the present by the resuscitated splendours of the past...the past exists now."
Taban Lo Liyoing hat dies ähnlich programmatisch in seine Gedichte einfließen lassen, in programmatische Gedichte, aus denen hier wiederum die programmatischsten bzw. die am stärksten satirischen und nicht etwa die poetischtsten zitiert werden sollen:
So heißt es etwa am Ende des bereits zitierten Gedichts (aus ‚Uneven Ribs’) (S. 51) seine gesamte Einstellung gleichsam resumierend:
‘Let's go back to pre-society days’
In einem anderen Gedicht mit dem bezeichnenden Titel
"MY BROTHER, THE NEGRO BOURGEOISIE"
(gemeint ist die in den USA) heißt es in zwei Passagen auf den Seiten 84 und 85:
“To This - must we only acknowledge a glorious past
`whose past has only been glorious?
Go to Mars
None on Earth.”
Und ein wenig weiter heißt es dann:
“A man must know himself, or
pains be taken to teach him unlearn all art
and learn all truth“
Wir haben bereits früher die Passage aus "Students Lament", in der von der schnellen Aufgabe der Progressivität nach der Unabhängigkeit die Rede war, erwähnt-. In der nächsten Strophe heißt es dann:
„Strange mules called Negritude
And African Personality
Overran the terrain
And kicked wisdom down
Or above our heads
Politicians quite
Unaware how low we are
On the ladder universal
Decided to halt the race
And embrace the niches sure
Where we were stuck for the moment
In order to call the eye
To a position unique
Though idiotic all the same.”
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