LITERATURE: Africa’s Writers Discuss Language

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sarah O'Hara

DUBLIN, Oct 31 1995 (IPS) - “I don’t know how to withstand so much outside interference. I don’t know how to withstand so many subversions. I don’t know how to negotiate the constraints and adjust myself to them.”

Thus the thoughts of Abdul Traore, an African man in Paris. Traore is the father of seven-year-old Loukoum: ‘The Little Prince’ of Belleville, in the novel of the same name.

Traore thinks he is going mad. But his creator, Calixthe Beyala — a novelist from Cameroon who describes herself as “a voluntary exile” in France — has very definite ideas about negotiating the constraints of being an African in Paris.

Beyala was one of four African writers reading at a seminar in Dublin recently, as part of the six-month-long Africa Festival here.

As it turned out, the four African writers — apart from Beyala, the seminar’s guests were Ahmed Sheikh from Senegal, Jamal Mahjoub, who is half-Sudanese, half-English, and Angolan novelist and journalist Sousa Jama — seemed to have little they could agree on. This provided for lively discussion but also led to a feeling of disappointment with some of the participants.

For one thing, Beyala started off with a firm lecture on what she sees as sexism in African culture. She left Cameroon, she explained, not because of war but because of the men. “It is women who bear Africa,” Beyala said, “women who carry Africa on their backs.”

Her comments went well with the Irish women in the audience, but much less so with the other writers present.

Then, Beyala, who writes in French, did not want to hear about the idea mooted by the poet Sheikh for African writers to write in African languages.

If I would write in my local language, she said “I would be understood by two dogs and a cat.” There were 167 languages in Cameroon alone, she said.

But, said Sheikh, there are more than 2,000 languages all over the continent, and that had not prevented communication in the past. “African people used to communicate from Cape to Caire before the coming of colonisation,” he said.

And many Africans, Sheikh added, speak more than one language: “A farmer in Senegal will speak at least three languages, not just of Senegal, but also of Gambia.” (MORE)

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