Something Torn and New

In recent years, there has been much talk, in addition to a spate of books, about an African renaissance. Responding to these currents, Manthia Diawara in 1994 launched the journal Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noir. But even before this, throughout the twentieth century, the word renaissance repeatedly cropped up in reference to the South African Xhosa and Zulu writers of the early twentieth century—Samuel Edward Krune Mqhayi and Benedict W. Vilikazi as well as the Dhlomo brothers, H.I.E. Dhlomo and R.R.R. Dhlomo, among them. In 1948 Cheikh Anta Diop used the term when he posed the conditions necessary for an African renaissance. And of course there was the Harlem Renaissance, the surge of black writing that included such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude Mackay, and Countee Cullen.

Renaissance describes a moment when the quantity and quality of intellectual and artistic output are perceived as signaling “a monumental historical shift”² in the life of a people, nation, or region. This phenomenon is not peculiar to Africa; indeed, there has been much talk of other renaissances in different histories and cultures. A book appropriately titled Other Renaissances contains chapters on Arab, Bengali, Tamil, Chinese, Harlem, Mexican, Maori, Chicago, Hebrew, and Irish renaissances;³ ironically, however, it makes no mention of any African renaissances, despite recent discussion of a Sophiatown renaissance as well as of African renaissance in general.

But any talk of renaissance invites a comparison with the European Renaissance, a term coined in the nineteenth century to refer to the Europe of the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries.⁴ This era occurred between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, coinciding with the beginnings of capitalist modernity. Such a comparison is inevitable for Africa because European capitalist modernity, emerging out of those voyages of the body and mind, was rooted in slave trade, slavery, and colonialism. Marx cites the turning of Africa into a warren for the hunting of black skins alongside the entombment of the original inhabitants in the gold and silver mines of America as signaling the rosy dawn of capitalism, a capitalism that came dripping with blood and dirt to the core. This act literally turned Africa into the dark side of the European Enlightenment, a darkness that lasted from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. What ensued was a hiatus in African development—that is, development seen as organically arising out of a balanced interplay of the internal and external contradictions in society. It put in motion what Walter Rodney has described as the development of underdevelopment.⁵

The hiatus may be described as an African middle ages, encompassing the entire slave and colonial period, during which Africa was dismembered from its past. When European writers referred to Africa as the Dark Continent or wrote novels on themes of darkness, they were ironically referring to what they had created with their kind of light. It was quite insightful of Conrad to see the gates to the Heart of Darkness of his novel as lying in European warehouses. Thames and Brussels were the gates into the heart of darkness where people were hunted down on account of their color and the shape of their nose.

There are significant parallels between the African and European middle ages. The European Renaissance marked the end of the European Dark Ages; the same Renaissance marked the beginnings of the African dark ages. If the picture of the world during the European dark ages was centered in God, Church, and universal empire, that of Africa was centered in a white God, Mother-country, and colonial empires. Can we meaningfully compare the African and European renaissances? The tendency in the current discussion of an African renaissance is to refer to it as a desirable ideal, an outcome that can be willed into being rather than a thing that has already happened or is happening now. To a certain extent this is true: A full-fledged renaissance has yet to flower.

Nevertheless, the African renaissance has already started: It began at the historical moment when the idea of Africa became an organizing force in opposition to the European colonial empires. V. Y. Mudimbe describes the idea of Africa as a product of the West’s system of self-representation, which included creation of an otherness conceived and conveyed through conflicting systems of knowledge.⁶ But I prefer to think of the idea of Africa—or, more appropriately, the “African idea,” as African self-representation. To distinguish it from the Mudimbeist formula according to which Europe is finding itself through its invention of Africa, I see the African idea as that which was forged in the diaspora and traveled back to the continent.

In the diaspora, Africans could see the whole continent as the home they were forced to leave no matter how they viewed their exile—as mercy in the case of Phyllis Wheatley, or as tragic loss in the case of Equiano and those who sang of feeling like motherless children a long way from home. The African idea in the diaspora finds its most dramatic self-realization in the independence of Haiti in the eighteenth century. In recognition of the centrality of Haiti in the African idea, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins, published in 1938, and written with Africa in mind, suggested that what the Haitians had done to counter plantation slavery—defeating the combined efforts of the most advanced Europeans of the day, including the expedition to restore slavery led by Napoleon’s own brother—could be replicated in Africa and the entire Caribbean region in the twentieth century. Aimé Césaire describes Haiti as the place where negritude was born. In this context the African idea was not simply a reaction to Europe’s self-representation with Africa as its otherness but a consciousness in organized opposition to the oppressing otherness that was Europe. It was this African idea that put in motion the rebirth of Africa. The European Renaissance was coterminous with the emergence of modern Europe from the Dark Ages of a tottering feudalism and a Catholic papacy; the African renaissance is coterminous with an emerging Afro-modernity from the dying colonialism of European empires. The European Renaissance launched European modernity; the African renaissance evolving in the struggle against the dark side of European modernity gave birth to Afro-modernity.

There are other important markers in the evolution of Afro-modernity (the 1900 Pan-African congress in London, for instance, or the 1914 birth of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association in Jamaica); but the formation of the African National Congress (ANC) in 1912 on the continent crystallized the African idea as an active agency in the constitution of the Afro-modern. The ANC was the first modern political organization on the continent to bring Africans of different cultural ethnicities together to fight for their place in the sun—or a place on which to lay their burden, to use the Garveysian phrase. This momentous event was inspired by the ideas of the New Negro Movement and Pan-Africanism in America, where some of the ANC’s founders had interacted with the thoughts of Alexander Crummwell, Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Dubois.⁷ Pixley Ka Isaka Seme, one of the founders of the ANC, and who in 1904 had written an essay titled “The Regeneration of Africa,” studied at Jesus College in Oxford and at Columbia University in America. He was friends with Alain Locke, editor of The New Negro. In the years from 1896 to 1900, Charlotte Manya Maxeke—another founder member and, later, president of its women’s league—was a student of W.E.B. Dubois at Wilberforce University, where she became friends with Nina Gomer, Dubois’s wife. Solomon T. Plaaje interacted with Dubois in the early 1920s in Harlem.⁸

The ANC was predicated on the African idea. Its anthem, Nkosi Sikelele Afrika, took the entire continent as the theater of its appeal and vision. Its creation marked Africans’ awakening to practical necessity and their ability to confront European capitalist modernity in its white colonial robes. Whatever the regional modifications and specificities, all other modern political parties in the continent followed the tracks of the ANC—some, including the Malawi National Congress, the Rhodesia National Congress, Uganda People’s Congress, incorporating part of its name. Others, such as Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP), the Zimbabwe African National Union (Zanu), the Zimbabwe African People’s Union, and the Kenya African National People’s Union (Kanu), embodied the idea of a congress of African peoples transcending ethnicities.

If we were to turn around the Hegelian contention that history as the embodiment of reason, which in turn is the embodiment of freedom, started in the East and found its apotheosis in the West, we can say that the African idea as the quest for freedom on a Pan-African scale extended from the diaspora to the continent and back again. It is a dialectical play of the ties that bind, to borrow a notion from W.E.B. Dubois’s Dusk of Dawn, in the fight to break out of the dark mantle of night with which Europe had wrapped Africa. Dubois’s mantra of colorful lights with which he sings of Africa opposes Hegel’s mantle of the night with which he wraps Africa.

The African idea became the animating force of modern politics in the continent; for whether in Kenya, Nigeria, Angola, or Senegal, people viewed themselves as Africans. This is not to say that continental Africans began to struggle against European occupation in the beginning of the twentieth century but, rather, that they had previously fought back as Zulus (in the Zulu wars); as IsiXhosa (in the Xhosa wars); and as Ashanti, Gĩkũyũ, or Ibo. The qualitative difference was their self-perception as Africans: They organized themselves under modern political parties as Africans. Zik (Nnamdi Azikiwe), who spearheaded the Nigerian struggle, titled his book Resurgent Africa; Kwame Nkrumah titled his Towards African Freedom. And just as the emergence of the modern in Europe was being reflected in the efflorescence of the arts, preceding it, surrounding it, and emanating from it, the 1912 moment was preceded, surrounded, then followed by a spate of important writings in South Africa, mainly in African languages⁹—although there was contention over whether English or the African languages were the best means of Afro-modernity’s self-realization. Examples of works written in African languages include S.E.K. Mqhayi’s poetry in Izwi la Bantu, 1892-1900 and his novella, Ityla Lamwele (1914); Walter Benson’s Zemki Imkomo Magwilandimi (1906); and Magema Frize’s Abantu Abammnyama (1922).

But the real turning point in the drama of Afro-modernity was the 1945 Manchester Congress, which, among other things, called upon the intellectuals and professional classes of the colonies to awaken to their responsibilities and join the masses to oust colonial rule.¹⁰ This effort resulted in the “Declaration to Colonial Peoples of the World,” to which leaders like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta responded by returning to Africa from their domiciles abroad to lead the continent out of the dark ages of colonial empire and into an era of African enlightenment. What resulted were the remarkable decades of the 1950s and 1960s, whose drama and pace of change were completely unprecedented in world history. Country after country in Africa reclaimed their independence, announcing themselves as players on the modern stage—and, in the process, reshaping that stage, or at least the color of it. Each country may have emerged as a nation-state, territorially speaking, but beneath their national colors all of their peoples saw themselves as Africans. The journey of the African idea, beginning in Haiti and championed by Pan-African congresses, reached its climax in the independence of Angola, Guinea Bissau, and Mozambique and the liberation of South Africa in the 1980s and 1990s.

The independence of African countries ushered in true Afro-modernity. The launching of the ANC in 1912 and its accession to power in 1994 framed a crucial century that witnessed the beginnings of the African renaissance and the drama of the Afro-modernity of which it is a part. These decades saw explosions in the arts—music, dance, and the plastic arts—as well as in African writing in European languages, a trend that continues to the present. Thus, just as the energy, vigor, and impetus of the European renaissance in the arts were only expressions, at the aesthetic level, of the energy and heat generated by the tensions and contradictions in the meeting point of two epochs—the old and the new, a dying world and another struggling to be born—much the same was true of Africa where the vigor, contradictions, and tensions of decolonization were transmitted in the arts and aesthetic vibrations of the new age. To the question

Artists do not create the tensions and conflicts in society; they respond to them, giving them shape, form, and direction or perhaps just recording them—and this is as true of the African artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as it is of the European Renaissance artists centuries earlier. And much like the European Renaissance, which began in fourteenth-century Italy and on the rest of the Western seaboard during the sixteenth century, the African renaissance has not been uniform or drastic: It has blossomed earlier in some places, later in others. And again, just as the European Renaissance begat the nation-states of Italy, Portugal, Spain, France, and England, the African renaissance has borne many nation-states of its own.

Even the contradictions of the ages are comparable. Those in the midst of the European Renaissance could view it as an expression of both hope and hopelessness. Erasmus of Rotterdam, for instance, alternated between denouncing it as corruption (“When was there ever more tyranny? When did avarice reign more largely and less punished?”) and lauding it as the “near approach of a golden age,” the dawn of a new world, making him wish he could grow young again; and even then he went back to denouncing it as the “irremediable confusion of everything.”¹² It was an age of massacres, most prominent of which was the Saint Bartholomew Massacre in Paris in 1572. It was an age of wars between and within the new nation-states, such as the conflicts involving England and Spain or the Thirty Years’ War in Germany between 1618 and 1648. In the same way one could see, in what has been unfolding in Africa, the faces of Nyerere, Mandela, Kofi Annan, Soyinka, Mafouz, Bishop Tutu, and Wangari Maathai, or those of Moi, Mobutu, Idi Amin, or Bokassa—the faces of rising democracies or reigning military dictatorships. The avarice, tyranny, and confusion that appalled Erasmus of Rotterdam apply also to postcolonial Africa, where diseases, famines, and massacres beset places like Rwanda, Darfur, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. Hope and hopelessness still contend for domination of the African soul as they did for that of the European soul.

The European intellectual movement was a reflection—in terms of ideas, ethics, and aesthetics—of fundamental changes in the organization of the production of wealth within the womb of the feudal societies of Europe. A blooming mercantile capitalism, Marx wrote, “gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.”¹³ This “revolutionary element” was the rising middle class, which sought and needed freedom from the ecclesiastical laws, the closed guilds, and a view of the world that denied it movement.

It is true that the African middle class, which led the faction committed to anticolonial nationalism, wanted freedom from colonial laws, racial barriers, and a racialized view of the world that put whiteness at the center and denied the class movement. But this nationalist class, critiqued by Frantz Fanon in terms of pitfalls of national consciousness in his book The Wretched of the Earth, did not come into leadership of the new states as an independent bourgeoisie: It was soon ensnared in neocolonialism, cold-war politics, and globalization. It was a class with no capital, no inventors among its members, no new worlds to conquer and rob—only a world in which to beg and a nation to rob. During the anticolonial struggle this class saw its power as derived from the people; and after independence, as derived from a cozy relationship with the Western bourgeoisie.

The Pan-Africanism that envisaged the ideal of wholeness was gradually cut down to the size of a continent, then a nation, a region, an ethnos, a clan, and even a village in some instances. Lacking a fundamental reorganization of production and a change in view of the sources of its power, the African middle class became merely an enabler of the easy flow of national resources from Africa to the West, with a lucrative commission fee for its role as a middleman. The European bourgeoisie stole from the colonies and from each other, raiding each other’s ships in the high seas: The African middle class uses the ship of state to loot the nation. Fragmented economically, its leaders pawning her resources, Africa remains the younger, poorer relation of global capitalism.

The European middle class had the vigor and energy of youth; the African middle class became as senile as Afriga the frog in Kwei Armah’s novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Indeed, senility set in before it ever experienced the vigor and daring of youth: In “its beginnings, the national bourgeoisie of the colonial countries identifies itself with the decadence of the bourgeoisie of the West.”¹⁴ The European bourgeoisie in its youth took charge of its own and raided others to augment its national coffers; the African bourgeoisie raids its own treasures to augment Western treasuries. This contrast is clearest when we consider the two groups’ different attitudes toward their most important heritage: languages.

The two salient features of the European Renaissance are discovery and recovery. By discovery I don’t mean the voyages of exploration and conquests or the creation of colonial otherness but, rather, Europe’s encounter with its own languages. Erich Auerbach describes the European Renaissance as “the movement through which the literary languages of the various European peoples finally shook off Latin.”¹⁵ Before this, Latin had occupied a position not too dissimilar from that occupied by European languages in Africa today: “[I]t was virtually the sole vehicle of intellectual life and written communication . . . a foreign language that had to be learned . . . cut off from the spoken language.”¹⁶ Overwhelmed by the pervasive presence of Latin, the pioneers of this shift were at first apologetic, time and again finding it necessary (much like Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill in the case of her choice of Irish) to answer the question as to why they wrote in the vernacular. For Dante, writing in Del Vulgari Eloquentia about two kinds of speech, the foreign and the vernacular, “the vernacular is the nobler, both because it is enjoyed by the whole world (though it has been divided into [languages with] differing words and paradigms), and because it is natural to us, while the other is more an artificial product.”¹⁷ He defends his choice of the Italian of Tuscany as the language of critical commentary, on the basis of its being the language of his primary experience. “And since the better known a route is, the more safely and more quickly it may be traveled, I shall proceed only along that language which is my own, leaving aside the others.”¹⁸ Regarding Italian as compared to other languages he finds that “each thing naturally desires its own self-preservation; so if the vernacular could have any desires of its own, it would desire to be preserved.”¹⁹ He rejected calls by one of his humanistic friends, Giovanni del Virgilio, to abandon the limited audience of a writer in vernacular and seek learned fame and immortality as a Latin poet. In response, Dante explained why he did not write in Latin, likening his vernacular to a “ewe who can hardly carry her udders, so filled they are with milk . . . I am getting ready to milk her with skilled hands.”²⁰ He wrote this response in perfect Latin, as if to show that he could compose in it, if he so chose, but he had consciously opted for his Italian.

In time, European intellectuals of every nation embraced their own languages with pride. By 1518, Martin Luther could look to his fellow native Germans and thank God “that I hear and find my God in the German language in a way which I have not found Him up to now in the Latin, Greek, or Hebrew tongues.”²¹ And speakers of English went from seeing the language as ineloquent, raw, crude, barbarous,²² and incapable of expressing scientific and literary thought with the precision and elegance of Latin to embracing it as elegant, eloquent, and capable of handling all thought. Some, like Samuel Daniel, even started describing it as the nation’s best glory, a future export to the world.

Allied to this discovery was the Europeans’ recovery of classical knowledge, thereby resurrecting the ancients as companions to the present—as illustrated in Dante’s choice of Virgil as his guide through the Inferno. Or in Machiavelli’s letter in 1513 explaining how the ancients were his daily companions during the writing of The Prince: Upon coming home in the evening, he would take off his everyday clothes, put on “the robes of court and palace, and in this graver dress I enter the courts of the ancients and am welcomed by them, and there I taste the food that alone is mine and for which I was born. And there I make bold to speak to them and ask the motives of their actions, and they, in their humanity, reply to me.”²⁴

An almost identical evocation of the ancients can be found in a passage by Montaigne, who writes how Plutarch “intrudeth himselfe into your work, and gently reacheth you a helpe-affording hand, fraught with rare embellishments, and inexhaustible of precious riches.”²⁵ And Philemon Holland talks of Livius as a living person with “something to say that might be vital to England’s destiny”; he asks Queen Elizabeth to “reach forth your gracious hand to T. Livius” and allow him “to live under your princely protection.”²⁶ In England, says Matthiessen, “the classical past became so vivid that it seemed to some minds almost more real than the present.”²⁷ Recovering from the past and recouping knowledge from contemporaries become a passion, a duty to one’s own language.

It is the art of translation that largely makes such recovery possible. This is how the world of the ancients became part of the European Renaissance’s present. Indeed, the impact of translations on the development of European languages and cultures is enormous, both in the broad cultural sense as a function of imitation and emulation and in the narrow linguistic sense whereby translation becomes an art of naturalizing the ancients such that they become speakers of modern European languages—as if the ancient texts were written in the modern. For instance, Martin Luther’s translation of the bible was seen as having brought about modern German. Jane Newman writes of German language societies that sprung up after Luther; they looked back to him, a century later, as the one who had “planted sweetness, dignity, and suppleness to our language.”²⁸ William Tyndale, in talking about his incentive for translating the bible into English, expressed sentiments similar to Luther’s in relation to English: “I had perceived by experience, how that it was impossible to establish the lay people in any truth, except the scripture were plainly laid before their eyes in their mother tongue, that they might see the process, order and meaning of the text.”²⁹ Through translations both men introduced their mother tongues into the community of holy languages.³⁰ Reformation as a whole could be seen as that which brought the various European languages into the family of holy languages of Hebrew, Latin, and Greek, for each of these languages could now lead the nationals directly to God. God understood vernacular.

Translations were not only from Latin and Greek but also from other European languages. In England, a nation that, according to Matthiessen, had grown conscious of its cultural inferiority to the continent, “suddenly burned with the desire to excel its rivals in letters, as well as in ships and gold.”³¹ Translations were the means of effecting the desired excellence. “The translator’s work was an act of patriotism. He, too, as well as the voyager and merchant, could do some good for his country: he believed that foreign books were just as important for England’s destiny as the discoveries of her seamen, and he brought them into his native speech with all the enthusiasm of a conquest.”³²

Through original productions and translations the vernaculars grew, and though they had met with resistance, the kind we see in Africa today, by the end of the sixteenth century their victorious emergence from the shadow of Latin was complete. Consider the exuberance of language that we find in Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Cervantes: These are writers who discovered the limitless expressive power of their languages, writers who reveled in the possibilities they saw in their rediscovered tongues. In their journey of emancipation, the languages had moved from diffidence, imitation, and emulation to self-confident readiness, thus surpassing and subjugating other tongues and cultures. The “I gave you language” line in Prospero’s admonition to Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest proceeded from the confident climax of the European Renaissance, a climax that unfortunately was also the beginning of Africa’s dismemberment.

No renaissance, however, can replicate all aspects of another; but all contain the central idea of rebirth and the spring of a new vision of being. Re-membering Africa is the only way of ensuring Africa’s own full rebirth from the dark ages into which it was plunged by the European Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modernity. The success of Africa’s renaissance depends on its commitment and ability to remember itself, guided by the great re-membering vision of Pan-Africanism. This idea has already served Africa well—inspiring, as it has done, Afro-modernity. But it is a flawed modernity for, among other things, it has yielded several nation-states founded on colonial boundaries that perpetuate the Berlin-based divisions, with the result that even people of the same language, culture, and history remain citizens of different states. These states, in turn, often erect insurmountable barriers in the movement of peoples, goods, businesses, and services.

But Pan-Africanism has not outlived its mission. Seen as an economic, political, cultural, and psychological re-membering vision, it should continue to guide remembering practices. Economic Pan-Africanism will translate into a network of communications—air, sea, land, telephone, Internet—that ease intracontinental movements of peoples, goods, businesses, and services. Africa becomes a power bloc able to negotiate on an equal basis with all other global economies. But this is impossible without a powerful political union, as championed by Kwame Nkrumah. Pan-Africanism has to translate into a United States of Africa with the African union transformed from a union of African heads of state into a genuine union of African peoples. Political Pan-Africanism should make the continent a base where African peoples, meaning continentals and people of African descent, can feel truly at home—a realization of the Garveysian vision of Africa for Africans, both at home and abroad. Such an Africa would be a secure base where all peoples of African descent can feel inspired to visit, invest, and even live if they so choose. But we are still far away from this. Instead, as a result of famines, massacres, denials of rights, insecurity, and intolerance—replicas of colonial times—virtually every African state is hosting refugees from its neighbors and citizens continue to flee from the continent altogether—a “brain drain” that is much talked about. In this sense African renaissance means, first and foremost, the economic and political recovery of the continent’s power, as enshrined in the vision of Pan-Africanism. But this can be brought about effectively only through a collective self-confidence enabled by the resurrection of African memory, which in turn calls for a fundamental change in attitude towards African languages on the part of the African bourgeoisie, the African governments, and the African intellectual community.

Diasporic African communities must try to add an African language to their cultural arsenal. For though the diasporic African has a new mother tongue, he can reach out to his African memory only by making efforts to learn an African language to add to, not replace, what he already speaks. In so doing he would be connecting himself to the means of the memory that has sustained him for so long in his struggles to find himself in a world that constantly puts barriers in his way. But the challenge is primarily one for those on the continent: to produce for Africa in African languages, because language is the basic re-membering practice—though it is often missing in discussions about intellectual and literary movements from negritude to Afro-centrism.

In fact, there has been an unbroken tradition of writing in African languages that goes all the way back to Timbuctoo in the twelfth century (even earlier in Egypt and Ethiopia) and continues to the present day. Mazisi Kunene, who even in exile continued to write in Zulu, can trace his literary ancestry in an unbroken line back to the imbongi (oral poets) of the Shaka court in the nineteenth century. Even when European languages had begun to seduce the minds of African graduates of colonial and missionary schools, there were some among them who argued against complete surrender to the seduction. Such was the case of S.E.K. Mqhayi, who at the dawn of the twentieth century argued for African languages against those South African intellectuals who thought that English was the best means of experiencing the modern. Ntongela Masilela’s work on the intellectual history of South Africa places Mqhayi’s work at the center of the early phases of the genesis of Afro-modernity. “His unyielding stand on the historic question of whether the English language or the African languages should be the instrument of representation in modernity defined in many ways the literary issue of South African modernity in the twentieth century,”³³ writes Masilela. Practicing what he argued out in theory, Mqhayi wrote in IsiXhosa, generating what some intellectuals even then gave the name of renaissance. Indeed, they praised him for standing up “for our language and by pen and word of mouth created a Renaissance in our literature.”³⁴ In the continent as a whole, the anticolonial resistance that climaxed in the emergence of several independent states also generated and, in turn, was reflected in a plethora of poems, songs, and newspapers in African languages. In Kenya all of these were banned by the colonial state, followed by casualties among the writers themselves: A partial list includes Gakaara Wanjau, who was imprisoned; Henry Muoria, who was exiled; and Stanley Kagĩka, who was killed. Other examples of continuity of writing in African languages include Amharic in Ethiopia and Kiswahili in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Swahili literature in East Africa follows an unbroken line from Muyaka to Abdilatif Abdalla.

What happened in the 1950s, with the dawn of independence—when, under the neocolonial context of that independence, Europhone writing came to be considered the norm—was therefore a deviation from this veritable tradition. African languages and literature are not dead, have never died; it’s just that the house they built was taken over by European languages, which act as though the African languages are corpses that will not rise from the dead to claim their house. The deviation, like the Anglophonic takeover of the identity of Irish literature, has taken on the mantle and identity of African literature. But this claim has not been without a challenge, the most celebrated being that of Obi Wali in the 1960s, when he wrote in Volume 10 of the journal Transition that Europhone-African literature was coming to a dead end, and that it would be just as ridiculous to describe as “African literature” works written by Africans in non-African languages as to describe as “French literature” works written in Yoruba by Frenchmen. (The most popular of my own works of nonfiction is Decolonising the Mind, which continues the same theme.) As a result of those challenges and the ensuing debates about the nature of the deviation and memory burial, there are indications of a return to the venerable tradition of Mqhayi, Fagunwa, Gakaara, Mazisi Kunene, and Abdilatif Abdalla—a visible but agonizingly slow movement whereby African languages are claiming back the title and ownership of the house they built. Some intellectuals and governments alike are beginning to pay attention.

In the year 2000, a number of African scholars and writers met in Eritrea and came up with the Asmara Declaration on African Languages and Literatures, a ten-point document that begins by calling on African languages to take on the duty, challenge, and responsibility of speaking for the continent. It then lists nine other conditions—including recognition of the vitality, equality, and diversity of African languages as a basis for the future empowerment of African peoples; the necessity of communication among African languages and their development at all levels of the schooling system; promotion of research, science, and technology in African languages; and the necessity of democracy and gender equality in the development of African languages—and it concludes by emphasizing that African languages are essential for the decolonization of African minds as well as for the African renaissance.

Some African governments are grappling with the reality of multiple languages and have taken specific stances on this matter. Most are still vague about it. But recently, during its sixth ordinary session in Khartoum, the African Union (AU), successor to the OAU, underlined the importance of African languages as instrumental tools for education and culture, development and progress, by establishing an African Academy for Languages as a specialized office of the AU seated in Bamako, the capital of Mali. In the same sixth ordinary session, the AU decided to declare 2006 the Year of African Languages. These are important symbolic steps in the right direction, but it is worth noting that in its previous life as the OAU, the organization had a cultural charter that lauded the centrality of African languages in modernization. Unfortunately the charter remained on paper. The hope is that the current AU position will move from paper to the ground and that all years—not just 2006—will be declared years of African languages.

But how do a thousand tongues, barely mutually comprehensible among themselves nationally, speak for a continent? Would Africa become a house of Babel? Would the multiplicity of African languages within and between states merely exacerbate the fragmentation of the continent? In a continent where postindependence has seen wars of secession in Nigeria, Somalia, Congo, and Ethiopia, such prospects are nightmarish. But it is also important to remember that those civil wars were not fought on language lines. In the case of Somalia, with its single-language history, the many-languages argument is an absurdity. But even if it were a factor in the conflicts, a multiplicity of languages in Africa would not be any worse or better than the multiplicity of languages in Asia and Europe.

Though translation has long had a bad name, dating back to the Platonic dialogues where the name of Hermes, the god who invented language and speech, is said to signify his being “an interpreter or a messenger or thief or liar, or bargainer,”³⁵ it has nonetheless played a crucial role in the development of many societies. Marxian texts that have inspired many social revolutions were read by their adherents in translation. Many words and phrases in the works of Lenin and Mao, passionately debated in classrooms and political platforms all over the world, are known only in translation. And we have already seen the role of translation in the European Renaissance and the emergence of capitalist modernity. It was the translation of the ninety-five Lutheran theses that launched reformation, with the bible itself coming to play a significant role in the development of European languages.

Indeed, the bible has played almost the same role in African culture as in European culture—an observation that brings us to an ironic dichotomy: On the one hand Europe suffocated and helped starve African languages, while on the other hand the necessity for religious conversion compelled Europe to maintain the written tradition of African languages. Missionary presses enabled some of the writings in African languages. But given the editorial censorship that did not want these writings to carry instances of anticolonial resistance, what the presses produced were often starved of content, leaving only that which served the needs of anthropology with its interest, at the time, in static pasts or that which pointed to the means of Africans’ conversion from themselves. Still, their translations of the bible and other tracts into African languages played a role that cannot be ignored, and they share credit in keeping alive the literary retention of African languages.

Translation is the language of languages, a language through which all languages can talk to one another. Thus, for a writer, given that translation between African languages can cement the heritages that are shared by the languages, the entire continent, with its vast African language audiences, becomes a potential market. Through translations of works written directly in African languages, a shared modern heritage will emerge. But apart from aiding conversation among contemporary African languages, translation will benefit the African renaissance. This is the theme of the next chapter, in which I describe South Africa as a microcosm of the black and African experience.

One of the greatest sons of Africa, Kweggyr Aggrey, used to tell the story of a farmer who brought up an eagle among the chickens. The eagle grew up behaving like a chicken and believing he was a chicken. One day a hunter visited the farmer and an argument ensued as to whether the eagle could remember who he was. The farmer was absolutely sure that he had turned the eagle into a chicken. The hunter asked whether he could try to revive the eagle’s memory. On the first day, he was unable to make him fly beyond the distance that chickens can manage. I told you, says the farmer: I have turned him into a chicken. On the second day, the same disappointment occurred, with the eagle flying a few yards and then diving downward, earthbound. I told you he cannot remember, says the farmer in triumph: He walks like a chicken and thinks like a chicken; he will never fly. The hunter does not give up. On the third day, he takes the eagle atop a hill and talks to him, pointing his eyes to the sky and reminding him that he is an eagle. And then it happened. Looking at the limitless immensity of the blue skies above, the eagle flapped his wings, raised himself, and then up he soared, flying toward the azure.