Living in Hope and History Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘world literature’: the world of our own, our challenge to the title each culturo-political and linguistic grouping on our planet has the hubris to claim for itself.
    Professor Lebona Mosia, an arts academic in South Africa, recently reflected on our Deputy President Thabo Mbeki’s concept of an African renaissance of roots, values, and identity, remarking that our people are emerging from an ‘imaginary history . . . whose white folks believed that South Africa is part of Europe, America (the USA) and Australia. Blacks have always recognized that they are part of Africa’. The same ‘imaginary history’ of course applies to Pan Africa, to the thinking of all ex-colonial powers.
    Does Thabo Mbeki’s renaissance sound like a renaissance of négritude?
    I don’t believe it is. Or could be. Circumstances in our countries have changed so fundamentally since that concept of the 1950s, when liberation was still to be won. The reality of African history has long begun to be recorded and established, from where it was cut off as anthropology and prehistory and substituted by the history of foreign conquest and settlers. One of the dictionary definitions of the wide meanings of renaissance is ‘any revival in art and literature’; as we writers take to ourselves the right to vary or add to the meaning of words, I would interpret the meaning of renaissance in Mbeki’s context not as reviving the past, whether pre-colonial or of the négritude era, but of using it only as a basis for cultural self-realisation and development in an Africa that
never existed before
, because it is an Africa that has
come through:
emerged from the experience of slavery, colonial oppression, the humiliating exploitation of paternalism, economic and spiritual degradation, suffering of every nature human evil could devise. A continent that has liberated itself; overcome.
    Africans have established, beyond question, that our continent is not part of anyone’s erstwhile empire. Secure in this confidence, and open-eyed at home as I hope we shall be to thenecessity to apply ourselves to developing Africa’s literary variety to-and-fro across our own Pan-African frontiers, it’s time to cross new frontiers on our cultural horizon, to turn the literary compass to measure whether we still should be pointing in the same direction towards the outside world.
    Which world? Whose world? The North—South axis was the one on which we were regarded so long only as on the receiving end, and which, latterly, we have somewhat culturally reversed: African writers have won prestigious literary prizes in England and France, and even Nobel Prizes; African music has become popular abroad, the international fashion industry presently has a vogue for somewhat bizarre adaptations of African traditional dress—well, Africa dressed itself up in Europe’s three-piece suits, collar, and tie; now
haute couture
Europe wraps itself in a
pagne
, a dashiki, a bou-bou . . .
    Of course we do, and should, retain our freedom of access to, appropriation of, European and North American literary culture. I believe we have passed the stage, in the majority of our countries, of finding Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Voltaire and Melville, ‘irrelevant’. I believe that, as writers and readers, all literature of whatever origin
belongs
to us. There
is
an acceptable ‘world literature’ in this sense; one great library to which it would be a folly of self-deprivation to throw away our membership cards.
    What
has
happened is that the works of our own writers, imparting the ethos of our peoples, have firmly and rightfully displaced those of Europeans as the definitive cultural texts in our schools and universities.
    But if you place the compass on a map you will see not alone that South–South and not North–South is our closer orientation, but that if you cut out the shape of South America and that of Africa