More than half a century has passed since most African countries gained independence. They have an image of sorts in international affairs; political and economic. In most cases, these are not very favourable.
In the field of science and literature, it is in literature that the world has paid attention to African practitioners. While we have heard of an African winning a Nobel Prize for his achievements in literature, we have not heard of one who has made it in science and economics.
I say an African guardedly. Perhaps I should say Africans. The African I am talking about is Professor Wole Soyinka of Nigeria. But what about Nadine Gordiner, a white South African. We have people of European and Asian descent who are permanently settled in Africa, much as people of African descent have become part of the United States population. Should these people be classified as part of African literature? I think they should; otherwise, we are guilty of racism.
Is there any African writer we can classify as a genius like Charles Dickens, Leo Tostoy, Shakespeare, Jean Jacques Rousseau? But hear the voice of Catherine Drinker Bawn in her Biography: “If the energy and originality of genius startles people”, she says so does the phenomenon of their abundance. Lesser talents produce sparely though these productions may be exquisits. But your true genius produces in shoals, in barrelful shelvesful with the level of quality rising and falling as witness Dickens, Thackeray Tostoy, Beethoven.
She has not included the name of H.G. Wells, one of the most energetic English, if not world, writers of the twentieth century. I do not know whether in terms of quality Wells’ oevre smacks of genius, but the fecundity of his imagination and his output were stupendous.
A university graduate in biology, he early on plunged into science fiction, one of his most famous books is The War of His Worlds, which is an imaginary invasion of planet earth by people from mars.
Wells wrote numerous science fiction books and a text book on biology and short stories. His versartility was amazing and, with no previous training in history, he wrote: The Outline of History. It was the most popular history book of the twentieth century. Par t of the explanation is the book’s literary style. For example, in chapter XXX, headed ‘Muhamad and Islam’, he wrote: “It is not within our scope to describe the wars by which in a hundred and twenty five years Islam spread from the Indus to the Atlantic and Spain, and Kashgan on the borer of China to Upper Egypt. Islam prevailed because it was the best social and political order the time could offer. It prevailed because everywhere it found politically apathetic people robbed, oppressed, bulled, uneducated and unorganised and it found selfish and unsound government out of love with any people at all. It was the broodiest, freshest and cleanest political idea that had yet come to the mass of mankind.
This is the style in which the whole book is written, fast-moving and easy to understand by anyone regardless of their background.
In 1982, there appeared a magazine all over English speaking Africa called African Drum published in South Africa. It was owned by an individual. Its editor was an Englishman called Anthony Sampson. It employed a dozen or so of bright South African editors. Among its freelance contributors was Elias Mtepuka, a Malawian born and educated in Likoma Island. We knew names of Todd Matshikisa, Can Themba, Eskia Mphahlele. I have forgotten the others.
Ten years later, most of these had gone elsewhere. I used to meet Matshikiza in 1962 in London. Sampson, too, left and went about studying Britain’s elite.
H e published a book Anatomy of Britain which became a best seller. He later revised it as The Changing Anatomy of Britain. For his literary venture, he was given a knighthood.
Perhaps his latest and magnum opus was the biography of Nelson Mandela. None of his African colleagues on the staff of the Drum wrote much except, perhaps, Mphahlele. It seems African writers shrink from strenuous work.
Perhaps also the most prolific African writer after World War II was Cyprian Ekwensi of Nigeria but he is now less known than his fellow Nigerian writers such as Chinua Achebe, famous for his pioneer novel Things Fall Apart and Wole Soyinka, who received the Nobel Prize for literature for his autobiography novel such as Ake.
Soyinka was first known for his plays but I doubt if he has written as many as Shakespeare 37, I am aware of only five of Achebe’s novels of which I have read Things Fall Apart , No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God.
Even with regard to nonfiction, I doubt if there is any African as prolific as Peter Drucker, the American Management guru. Bertraud Russell and John Maynard Keyness, philosopher and economist of Cambridge University. W. Somersat Maugham said that you cannot write well unless you write much and you must form a habit to write.
Despite its popularity, I do not think Achebe’s Things Fall Apart deserves to be called the Great African Novel. It is only when African writers start producing in abundance like European and American writers that there will emerge an African Tolstoy, Dumas, Shakespeare Goethe.
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