Living in Hope and History Read Online Free PDF

you can fit the east coast of South America and thewest coast of Africa together, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle making a whole—the lost continent Gondwana, sundered by cosmic cataclysms and seas.
    This romantic geographical connection is merely symbolic of the actual, potential relationships that lay dormant and ignored during the colonial period when our continent of Africa was set by European powers strictly on the North–South axis. Climate and terrain are primary experiences for human beings; many South American and African countries share the same kind of basic natural environment, which determines not only the types of food they grow and eat, but the myths they created, and the nature of city life they have evolved. Both continents were conquered by European powers, their culture over-run and denigrated. Both have won their freedom from foreign powers through suffering, and suffered subsequently under brutal dictators in internecine wars among their own people. Both bear a burden of their people’s poverty and confront neo-colonialism exacted in return for their need of economic aid. Finally, there is the strange reciprocal bond: with those communities in South America descended from slaves brought from Africa.
    All this in common, and yet we know so little of South American writers’ work and life. Aside from some few big names, such as Borges of Argentina, Machado de Assis of Brazil, Mario Vargas Llosa of Peru, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes of Mexico, Gabríel Gárcia Marquez of Colombia, we do not know the work of the majority of South American writers, with whom, in many ways, we have more
existential
ties than with writers in Europe and North America.
    Industrialists and entrepreneurs are opening up their South–South routes of trade, matching the exchange of raw materials, processing, and expertise which countries in South America and Africa can supply for one another. They are givingmore than a side-glance away from the fixed gaze of North—South development. Recently the poet Mongane Wally Serote and I visited Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, and there met writers from other South American countries, as well. All were eager to grow closer to their recognition that our literatures are reciprocal in the ethos of our many shared existential situations, from the colonised past to the development problems of the present, both material and cultural. If the industrialists and entrepreneurs are paying attention to the material reciprocity, why are we, as writers, not looking South—South in a new freedom to choose which world, whose world, beyond our own with which we could create a wider one for ourselves?
    In our first concern, which is to develop an African ‘world literature’ as our status, we should keep well in mind the words of the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz. With the exceptions of the pre-Hispanic civilisations of America, he writes, all civilisations—including China and Japan—have been the result of intersections and clashes with foreign cultures. And the Congolais writer Henri Lopes, in his novel
Le Lys et le Flamboyant
, is speaking not only of the mixed blood of tribe, race, and colour of many of our people in Africa, but of the interchange of ideas, of solutions to a common existence, when he writes, ‘Every civilisation is born of a forgotten mixture, every race is a variety of mixtures that is ignored.’ The nurture of our writers, our literature, is a priority which should not create for us a closed-shop African ‘world literature’, a cultural exclusivity in place of the exclusion, even post-colonial, that has kept us in an ante-room of self-styled ‘world literatures’. Let our chosen status in the world be that of writers who seek exchanges of the creative imagination, ways of thinking and writing, of fulfilling the role of repository of the people’s ethos, by opening it out, bringing to it a vital mixture of individuals