The Many "Spaces" of the African Writer: The Meeting of African Writers in Durban, South Africa, 2-7 March 1998

In March 1997, a group of South African writers was invited to a writers’ festival in Djibouti, where they were able to exchange ideas with some of their counterparts from francophone Africa. The success of the Djibouti experience led to the conception of a more elaborate follow-up that took place 2–7 March 1998 in the South African port city of Durban. Tagged “The Time of the Writer” and placed within the contentious thematic ambit of “commitment,” the festival was organized jointly by the Centre for Creative Arts of the University of Natal in Durban, the local Alliance Française, and the Johannesburg-based Institut Français d’Afrique du Sud (IFAS). Apart from literary manifestations, the organizers included a number of art exhibitions in the program in order to highlight the interface “between text and image.”

The caliber of the invited writers and the discursive poignancy of the debate topics clearly underscore the significance of the meeting at this particular point in the evolution of African literature. From the francophone side of the linguistic divide came Tierno Monenembo (Guinea), Abdelkader Djemaï (Algeria), Abdourahman Ali Waberi (Djibouti), Idris Youssouf Elmi (Djibouti), and Edouard Glissant (Martinique). The anglophones included Breyten Breytenbach (South Africa), Farida Karodia (South Africa), Zakes Mda (South Africa), Marguerite Poland (South Africa), Barbara Trapido (South Africa), Yvonne Vera (Zimbabwe), Lettie Viljoen (South Africa), Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), and this writer, also from Nigeria.

The well-choreographed dance to which the invited writers were treated on the opening night at the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre, University of Natal, drew powerful attention to the idea of space in a postmodern, global capitalist context. Performed by the Siwela Sonke Dance Company before a capacity crowd, the dance, appropriately titled “Shifting Spaces, Tilting Times,” took the audience through the mutations that our physical, urbanized space has undergone in the twentieth century. These mutations have resulted in a certain geography of chaos, forcing the subject to deploy such weapons as hybridity and multiculturalism in the bid to negotiate his survival within a certain existential impasse. Using appropriate visual effects and background architectural devices ranging from huts to modern skyscrapers, “Shifting Spaces” subtly brought out the familiar theme of the manichean binarism between tradition and modernity that has been responsible for many of the tensions in our existential space. A note of warning undergirded the performance: our inability to resolve these contradictions and maximize the multicultural possibilities of our increasingly complex space can only lead us to a state of babelian anarchy.

Earlier in the night, South Africa’s comic actor and playwright Pieter-Dirk Uys had taken the audience down memory lane, vividly evoking what it meant to be an “anti-establishment” writer in the apartheid dispensation. Faced daily with the threat of being consigned to what Fanon calls “la zone du non-être” (no-man’s land) through the ubiquitous bans, Uys submitted that the only weapon at the disposal of the committed writer in those bitter days was subversive humor. He narrated how he wrote anti-apartheid plays only to send anonymous invitations to agents of the apartheid state to come and arrest the playwright! Things came to a head when he instigated his own father to join the censorship board while he continued to write “subversive” plays. However, Uys’s celebration of South Africa’s postapartheid discourse of African Renaissance provided the inflatus for Soyinka’s intervention in the night’s proceedings. The Nobel laureate opined that African Renaissance, which has become the new singsong of South Africa’s intellectuals, is still shrouded in definitional obscurity. He therefore called for clarifications regarding the exact meaning of the concept and the factors that willed it into being. Nevertheless, if we were to understand the discourse within the epistemic paradigms of rebirth and freedom, Soyinka surmised that African Renaissance had always existed in various forms in Africa and can indeed account for the discourse of cultural nationalism in the West Africa of the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Soyinka remarked, however, that while such euphoric discourses swept through the...