The Dead End of African Literature?
1963; Indiana University Press; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/2934441
ISSN0041-1191
Autores Tópico(s)African history and culture studies
ResumoDorothy Sekkade, Death. 1963. Woodcut Perhaps the most important achievement of the Conference of Writers of English Expression held in Makerere College, Kampala, in June I962 is that literature as now defined and understood leads nowhere. conference itself marked the climax of the attack on the Negritude school of Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire. For some time now, writers of English expression like Ezekiel Mphahlele, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo have treated this kind of literature, which expresses sterile concepts such as negritude or the African personality,1 with the utmost derision. One would say that Negritude is now dead, judging from the confident tones of the remarks and decisions made at the Makerere conference. Another significant event at the conference was the tacit omission of Amos Tutuola. Not only was Tutuola, who is undoubtedly one of Africa's most significant writers, not present in the conference, but there was a deliberate exclusion of his works in the discussions of the conference. In fact, according to the conference report, Tutuola's publishers protested the implied questioning of their integrity in publishing this writer's works. One can guess that Tutuola received this kind of treatment partly because influential critics like Janheinz Jahn have repeatedly grouped him with the Negritude school, and partly because he has gone out of line, winning acclaim overseas for using a kind of English expression that is nonIbadan and non-Makerere. With the now seeming defeat of the Negritude and Tutuola schools of writing, what now represents literature can be seen from a few examples from some of the writings of those who now dominate our literature. Una Maclean, reviewing J. P. Clark's play, Song of a Goat, opens in the following fashion: The author of this poetic melodrama possibly perceives himself as some sort of Tennessee Williams of the Tropics. Suddenly the sultry symbolism of the sex war seeps through the swamps, to hang like a
Referência(s)