Under the Eyes of Texas

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Austin, Texas--in the mind of any student from Africa interested in the continent's literary affairs--would have had the plenitude of the Vatican, or Mecca. Everyone knew of the existence of the African and Afro-American Research Institute, the Humanities Research Center, Research in African Literatures, and that strangely un-African name and center of energy that somehow drew these institutions together, Bernth Lindfors. Others like myself, from South Africa, Malawi, Kenya, Nigeria, Cameroon, made the trip, usually with tenuous scholarship funding, to risk a great deal on the mysterious chemistry that associated Texas with Africa.

What a shock we received when we got there. Not only students, but many faculty, spoke an almost impenetrable dialect of English, one which, as J. M. Coetzee once remarked, might as well have come from the mouths of Trobriand Islanders. Papier-mâché cattle adorned the entrances of bookstores, middle-class cowboys and Generation X punks jostled unkempt sidewalks, and Confederate heroes dominated the quadrangles. Most surprisingly, especially to someone from as embattled a place as South Africa was in the 1980s, in Austin's public spaces there was no sign of any self-consciousness or ambiguity about either a Texan or a national identity. Nor, it seemed at first glance, was there much hand-wringing in the English department, which is where one had to establish oneself if one wanted to work with Lindfors. There they still taught undergraduate courses with titles like "Masterworks of Literature: British," or more tellingly, "Masterworks of Literature: American," although everywhere else the canon, patriarchy, and national identity were in crisis. And the heat, of course, unlike anything in Africa, was unspeakable.

So where in this squared-off, seemingly unnuanced intellectual complex was African literature? The answer was, in Lindfors's office. It was a haven, a nest, an oasis, certainly not a Mecca, and it would come as a further shock to discover that there were other students, and a few faculty, who did not even know who Lindfors was. They should have known, since his research output was more voluminous than most, as the English graduate students' association discovered when they ran surveys of the faculty through the freshly online MLA bibliographies. As for the Institute, its principal function was to coordinate undergraduate courses on Africa and in Black Studies, and the Humanities Research Center, impressive though it obviously was, had not invested in African literature other than its collection of white South African manuscripts from the 1950s and 1960s (a fine collection, but marginal to those with an interest in autochthonous expression). Without exaggeration, one could say that African literature in Texas was Bernth Lindfors.

After twelve months I discovered, fortunately, that Texas was bigger than Lindfors, and not just in the clichéd sense in which Texas is bigger than anything else. Texas revealed its riches, gradually. But I also discovered that Lindfors was bigger than Texas, in the sense that the circuits to which he was connected were impressively global. As a journeyman-apprentice on RAL, working on the correspondence with typewriter and dictaphone, I discovered the North American community of the ALA, the connections with Europe, especially France, Belgium, and the United Kingdom, and the delayed but crucial links with writers and scholars at places like Fourah Bay, Ibadan, Nairobi, and Johannesburg. (A moment from these labors I still cherish is having to locate obsolete typewriter ribbons in a Texas warehouse, to be sent to Amos Tutuola.) The price of this connectedness was that one frequently had to cope with Lindfors's absence from Texas. But this expressed concretely what was self-evident intellectually, namely, that what turned out to be marginal in Texas, was a project of major international significance.

What was "the Lindfors project"? We need look no further than the editorial of the first number of RAL (1970):

A decade ago the number of scholars actively teaching or doing research on...