Читать книгу A Companion to African Literatures - Группа авторов - Страница 15

In 1968, a short six years after the Makerere conference, three academics based at the University of Nairobi – Taban lo Liyong, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Henry Owuor‐Anyumba – submitted a memorandum to the acting head of the English Department at the university seeking the abolition of the department, to be replaced with a Department of African Literature and Languages. The submission was in response to a presentation by the acting head of the department to the faculty board, discussing the place of cognate departments such as Modern Languages (French) and disciplines such as Linguistics and African Languages in relation to the English Department. The three academics took strong exception to this line of thought, particularly for the manner in which it was underpinned by “a basic assumption that the English tradition and the emergence of the modern west is the central root of our consciousness and cultural heritage” (Ngugi wa Thiong’o 1995, 439). Instead, the three scholars emphasized the need to “orientate ourselves towards placing Kenya, East Africa, and then Africa in the centre,” not so much as a rejection of other literary cultures, but as a reconfiguring of the patterns of dominance inherited from the colonial academy in Eastern Africa which centered English studies, by “establish[ing] the centrality of Africa in the department” (441). Recognizing the influence of European literatures, Portuguese, French, Swahili, Arabic, and Asian literatures in shaping modern African literature, the three proposed that the new reconfigured department center African oral literature, modern African literature, and “a selected course in European literature” (440). Curiously, they also felt strongly about Francophone African literature and proposed that knowledge of English, Kiswahili, and French be compulsory (440). The emphasis on oral literature was in part motivated by its interdisciplinary possibilities, as it would encompass anthropology, history, psychology, religion, and philosophy while simultaneously encouraging students’ sense of rootedness and innovation. In their words, supplementing modern African Literature courses with Oral Tradition courses meant that “the new literature [would] be set in the stream of history to which it belongs and so be better appreciated; and on the other hand, be better able to embrace and assimilate other thoughts without losing its roots” (441). Overall, the emphasis was on placing “Africa at the centre of things, not existing as an appendix or satellite of other countries and literatures,” following which one could then “radiate outwards and discover peoples and worlds around us” (441).

The subsequent public memory of this moment in the shorthand of “abolition of the English Department” rendered the memo and the moment open to oversimplification in succeeding renditions. In the process, an important conversation about working assumptions of literary value that determine syllabi decisions has largely been under‐explored, yet it is one of the more interesting and prescient concerns the three academics raised. As they argued, the emphasis on teaching works of “undisputed literary excellence” not only obscures questions of positionality that shape literary value, but is also counterintuitive, as in any society “it is better to study representative works which mirror their society rather than to study a few isolated ‘classics,’ either of their own or of a foreign culture” (441).

In the end, the three main universities in the region – the Universities of Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, and Makerere University – replaced the English Department with Literature Departments. It would be a while, though, before the questions of value were embraced in the spirit proposed by the three scholars, especially where local popular fiction was concerned, as many of these departments retained inherited ideas of great literature and its centrality to literary studies. These same dynamics would later play out as cross‐generational tensions between the academy – primarily the University of Nairobi professoriate – and the emerging generation of young writers affiliated with the Kwani literary magazine and their iconoclastic approach to notions of the literary. A second unforeseen result was that the beneficiaries of the Ngugi–Anyumba–Taban 1972 revolution were left “stuck in their grove of stylistics, oral literature and the nineteenth‐and‐twentieth‐century European canon” to the exclusion of popular literature and cultures and postmodernism (Siundu 2016, 1549–1550). At the same time, it is interesting to revisit these debates and their implications in the region, at a time when the South African academy finds itself confronted by these same issues through student demands for what they term the decolonization of curricula.