Books for Africa

It began two years ago: a project to pay tribute to the “jewels” of African literature. In February in Accra, Ghana, the list of “Africa’s 100 Best Books of the 20th Century” was announced, and this month the project reaches its culmination with ceremonies, conferences and exhibitions in Cape Town and Harare, the latter as part of the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair (ZIBF). The focus of these conferences, using the “100 Best Books” theme, will be The Impact of African Writing on World Literature. It will be interesting to see what emerges.

The concept of a hit parade, as it were, of Africa’s 100 top books was kicked off by Dr Ali Mazrui, one of Africa’s leading academics. He is the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at Binghamton University in New York, as well as holding professorships at two other American universities and Jos University in Nigeria. The occasion was a celebration of the 70th birthday of Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart (1958), at Bard College in New York. At the ZIBF later the same year, Mazrui expanded on his idea.

“In 1998,” he said, “the Modern Library Board … in the USA chose the 100 great books in English of the 20th century and ranked them. Ulysses by James Joyce was ranked first and foremost. And The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington was number 100. The majority of the books were from the Commonwealth and almost all the rest from the United States.

“No African novel in the English language made the first 100 — not even Chinua Achebe’s work or the works of Nobel laureates Wole Soyinka and Nadine Gordimer. Was this linguistic apartheid combined with racial apartheid?”

Not quite, said Mazrui, noting that the African diaspora was accounted for by African-American novelists Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, number 19), Richard Wright (Native Son, 20) and James Baldwin (Go Tell It on the Mountain, 39).

But Mazrui continued: “Should we be alarmed that none of the great African writers have made the list of the top 100? It would have been nice if Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart was included in the list of the 100 top novels of the 20th century. It certainly deserved to be. Other Achebe enthusiasts might vote for Arrow of God (1964) as Achebe’s most profound novel. But none of his works made the list. Was linguistic apartheid verging on the racial?”

Mazrui noted that “the only authors who made the list … whose mother tongue was not English were Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov and Salman Rushdie”. “This means one of two things: either writing in English when English is not one’s native language is a far bigger handicap than we had all assumed or that the judges of the top 100 novels of the 20th century were simply too Anglo-Saxon themselves. On balance I prefer the latter explanation. The judges were probably too Anglo-Saxon in their prejudices, even if some judges were from the wider Commonwealth.”

He exhorted Africans to seek out the “jewels” of their literature, and the project was officially launched at that edition of the ZIBF, in collaboration with the African Publishers’ Network, the Pan-African Booksellers’ Association and the Pan-African Writers’ Association. Now, two years later, the project has come to fruition. The list has been announced, though the books on it have not been ranked.

On the list are 19 South African titles — a healthy 20% of the list. Among them are A Dry White Season by André Brink, Country of My Skull by Antjie Krog, Life and Times of Michael K by JM Coetzee, Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer, Die Swerfjare van Poppie Nongena by Elsa Joubert, Ingqumbo Yeminyanya by AC Jordan, Living, Loving and Lying Awake at Night by Sindiwe Magona, The Soul of the White Ant by Eugene Marais, Down Second Avenue by Ezekiel Mphahlele, Inkinnsela yaseMgungundlovu by Sibusiso Nyembezi, Long Walk to Freedom by Nelson Mandela, Native Life in South Africa by Sol Plaatje and Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton, Third World Express by Mongane Serote, and The Seed Is Mine by Charles van Onselen.

As for the rest of the list, there are many acknowledged classics of African literature on it, as well as some titles that have not reached much of a general public beyond the bounds of academia.

Nominations were invited in 2000, in the categories of literature for children, creative writing (including novels, stories, plays and poetry) and scholarship/non-fiction. An African book was considered to be a work on an African subject by someone either born in Africa or who acquired citizenship of an African country.

A total of 1 521 nominations were received, with some books (such as Things Fall Apart) receiving multiple nominations. This list was reduced to 500 titles, from which the jury selected the final 100.

The 16-person jury was chaired by Njabulo Ndebele, vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, and included African academics working around the world and the Egyptian minister of culture.

Looking at the full list, one notes that relatively few of the 100 books were initially published in Africa, though South Africa’s record in this regard is exemplary. Several of these books are also now out of print. Can the hit parade of Africa’s 100 best books help to change a situation in which literature, like so many other commodities of the colonial and post-colonial era, has become something Africa exports in a raw form, to be manufactured, as it were, in the colonial metropole, and then re-exported to Africa?

Spike Guara of the ZIBF replied to this question: “the project is meant to boost African publishing and the publication of books by Africans. ZIBF can only do

so much as a marketing organisation. However, it is hoped that publishers will rise to the occasion and take up the challenge by reprinting those books out of print and by so doing give them a new lifeline. ZIBF hopes, in the long run, to brand all books on the list for marketing purposes.”

Yes, Africa has produced some great books, but the drive for total literacy and a sustainable publishing industry within the continent still has some way to go. Let us hope that the grand gestures of the “African renaissance”, of the New Partnership for Africa’s Development and the African Union help push this process along, and that when it comes to publishing African work Africans will one day wholly own the means of production as well.

As Mazrui poetically put it, speaking of African literature’s roots in a rich oral culture, “Africa, the Garden of Eden which gave birth to the first human lullaby, may yet be destined to protect the legacy of the lullaby for all eternity.”

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