“Please, give me a few more minutes. I am busy now,” Kole Omotoso says to me before going back to his office at the Vodacom 4U shop that he and his wife run at the Carlton Centre in Jo’burg’s CBD.
I had called him the previous day to ask for an interview. He said it was not possible then. ‘You know why? I am at the airport in Tripoli.” He was in the capital of Libya for a conference where he presented a paper titled The Pursuit of the African Union.
In the paper Omotoso applauds the achievements of the Organisation of African Unity — the precursor to the African Union — despite the various impediments that obstructed its way, including fighting for freedom in Angola and other Portuguese colonies and, eventually, South Africa.
‘Everybody was certain that Palestine would achieve its ambition of being a state free from Israeli occupation through the efforts of the Arab League long before South Africa would be liberated,” Omotoso says in the paper.
A former professor of African literature at the University of the Western Cape, Omotoso now runs the Africa Diaspora Research Centre in Jo’burg and occasionally does work for Unisa’s Centre for Africa’s Renaissance Studies.
But it is as the author of The Edifice, The Combat and several other plays and novels that he achieved fame. First published in 1972, The Combat has just been reissued by Penguin as part of its Modern Classics series. It tells the story of a struggle between two friends, both backed by foreign interests, over the welfare of a street child in a state recently taken over by the military. The new edition carries an afterword in which Omotoso takes issue with the comic portrayal in post-liberation literature by African authors of Africans as ‘incapable of succeeding in the modern industrial world”.
‘A simultaneous reading of Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson and Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People should be an interesting exercise in this light. The African politician was ridiculed for the fun of the European reader and the perplexity of the African reader. Why can’t they create morally upright characters?” he says about the character of Chief Nanga in A Man of the People. ‘Every politician now calls himself a man of the people. These people have become figures of fun.”
He bemoans a situation in which more and more of the continent’s writers have given up and simply resort to ‘dismal images”. I counter that The Combat could be read as dismal. He agrees and says: ‘The child represents the state that is not nourished to the full.
‘One hopes that other African countries don’t go the same way. I try not to be despondent and hope that, cumulatively, things will change,” he says, without much conviction.
Omotoso contends that the continent’s multitude of problems result directly from a failure in leadership. He says that in an ideal world the writer should write, the carpenter should make furniture and the journalist should report what is going on. ‘Do you as a journalist abandon journalism for politics?”
I say the American writer Norman Mailer twice ran for — and lost — New York mayor and the late Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo fought — and died — for Biafra. I am thinking of those who have argued that being an artist doesn’t preclude them from taking up other citizen roles and a contrary argument by James Baldwin that a writer doesn’t escape one’s role as a writer by becoming something else: ‘One does not become something else, one becomes nothing.”
‘But where are they now?” Omotoso asks.
For Omotoso the origin of a host of these problems is located in what he calls ‘the problem of double space”. Simply put, this phenomenon came about because of the Berlin Conference of 1884/85 at which European powers collapsed independent empires, city states and kingdoms into arbitrary boundaries. As a consequence ‘a place like Nigeria contained the ethnic national spaces of so many peoples who would not think of themselves as Nigerians for a long time”.
A more contemporary example of the problem that double space poses is, say, when a mobile telephone company has to install a communication tower and the most suitable place happens to have a shrine. ‘Are we going to respect the people’s shrine and put the tower in an inferior place or do we tell them to move?”
‘The shrine should have to move. People have to move on,” Omotoso says with heat. I say to him that his decision is a natural one because of his links to local cellphone company Vodacom, of which he is very much the public and advertising face. He smiles good naturedly for a moment and then says, quite seriously, that the continent’s inability to compromise with modernity has set it back.
He says Africa’s attempts to grapple with modernity are not unique. Everywhere peoples and cultures have had to compromise. ‘We have no way of preventing the future from coming,” he says. ‘A nation is a set of decisions, options and choices taken or not taken.”
Africa’s many problems are not made any easier by what Omotoso calls ‘the literary menace of the trickster”. This is in part because of the oppression that has been the lot of black people the world over. ‘In a situation of plantation slavery, slaves may have had to combine cunning, trickery and dishonesty in order to merely survive,” he says in his essay in The Combat. ‘Every success of the trickster is a point against the system.”
Omotoso says this becomes a problem when Africans run countries and companies and yet continue to combine these ‘new victorious roles with the old trickster mode” — a scenario he likens to the purchaser of a cake ambushing those who are bringing it to him.
When we turn to talk about local language publishing he bemoans the small numbers of books coming out in black languages. He says that innovative ways should be found to produce literature in local languages. A certain anger seems to seize him when we talk about how people from the black middle class have chosen to communicate with their children in English instead of in their mother tongues. ‘I don’t know why some Africans are so idiotic and illogical,” he fumes.
Omotoso — himself fluent in Yoruba, Arabic, French and English — says ‘our languages are not just words. They contain meanings, concoctions, knowledge and experiences and depriving one’s kids of a black language is depriving them of the knowledge” — and everything embedded in that language.
Perhaps he could be right after all when he says, cynically, that it could be ‘a good thing that there are so many uneducated Africans around to continue the traditions of their languages, while the educated elite sells its soul to the world out there”.