Farafina 12 by Farafina Telling Our Own Stories

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FARAFINA is th e goal is to Tell Ou Bambara word for Africa. Our the best in conte r Own Stories by showcasing mporary African ideas. Submissions of up to 25 00 w ord s are welcome by email, in Micros submissions@kac oft Word format only, to hifo.com. We prefer short sto reviews, essays, ries, exposĂŠs, interviews, photographs. Subcartoons, drawings and topical and shou missions should be original, ld or to people of A relate to any part of Africa, fric part of the world an ancestry living in any . be acknowledge Unsolicited poetry will neither d will receive a res nor published. A submission po Letters to the edit nse within 30 days. letters@kachifo. or should be sent to com. To subscribe plea www.kachifo.com se use our website payment to: Kac or send a written request with hif Onikan, Lagos, N o Limited, 25 Military Street, subscriptions@kaigeria. You can also e-mail: SMS to: +234 80 chifo.com, call or send an 3 403 8974. Subscription (12 iss packaging is N6,0 ues) including postage and $79.99 (all other 00.00 (within Nigeria) or countries). Digital subscriptio account) is N4000n (PDF files sent to your email (all other countries.00 (within Nigeria) or $49.99 ).

If you have any p please e-mail: subroblem with your subscription or send an SMS scriptions@kachifo.com, call to +234 803 403 8974. Visit www.farafin amagazine.com for the best of contemporary Afr ican ideas, onlin e. The views expressed by contributors are those of the authors and not necessarily those of Farafina ma gazine.

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DECEMBER

Home, Exile, and the Spaces in Between

Ayi Kwei Armah The African Revolutionary

Speaking The Machine A Personal Narrative of a Translation Experience

SembĂ¨ne: Defiant to The Last

Letter Home In the Fourteenth Year

HomeComing

PerSesh Writing Workshop: The African Experience

Adedibully: A Dinosaur's Last Dance

From The Blogs

Review: Bamako

Review: What Google Has Joined Together

Unfinished Matter

A Festival of African Film An Interview with Mahen Bonetti

Exhibit 12

By Isidore Okpewho

By Jim McConkey

By Kola Tubosun

Edited by AKIN ADESOKAN

CONTENTS

By Seke Somolu

By Afam Akeh

By Omowunmi Segun

By E.E. Sule

By Tade Ipadeola

Molara Wood Toye Gbade

Paul Odili Interviews Chinweizu

By Sean Jacobs

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By Enimien Etomi

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N A K O S E D AKIN A R’S NOTE

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ce of the Eloquen e h T 's sitory ah of expo an wei Arm ic K s i s y la A c 6 a g; 0 dle of 20 g memoir and as not surprisin rs, in w n the mid tou u an intrig ut fanfare. This notices, book o y Scribes, out of ith icit rrived w ith publ ve been a h ld prose, a nt complete w u to the wo me aversion s, etc., e c w n n w ie u v o r o n n te in an well-k profiles, with a author's for the writer r print of characte der the im ed in n t. u h k g o li o e b e lim bas ation of th e friends and c li b u p t cy of the uie som e urgen But the q by Armah and th it e li e b to g about ed h (found gal) would seem k, and conversin idea: a k n A r e P ne at boo pon an uine, Se eading th f Farafina, I hit u R . Popeng ised. We rs a e book ra , and her o es it b e s g li h t a b s t u s a p e , th m ook are es htar Bak around the issu taries on the b ys that u M h it a w en m ifferent w s are olloquiu eries of comm ss the d le e p sort of c r s o d e d a p a r and rs to athe s g to ir u a f b i ld f u a tr o n n onstrate w co ca d to dem ge other devoted to Afri te ra n u a ans o w c e n e ns. W tions y, is a me s r it e tu v ti tt ti s a a p in e r l c in cultura ith certa formed through sounded, then a break w t leap trying to , such as is trans s of that word. I ginative rd a im e e r f s o n tu l e that cu standa many s the kind al, in the ct idea, but it is at seems to be ntinent: of surviv h a o to the c an abstr y from w now, like s to move awa matters relating uire ng with one req f things. en deali h w e s e state o n hat th t n e respo m leap is w u or la e e v s ti u a c x in e g at yo ima either r not, wh uch an s o t t c a a h t tr ya s to me nd, ab aim. Eg It seems ying to achieve a guided by that riting Sesh w been tr argely l r s e n a P e h e a e b n as r with t th Farafi edition h in-residence a ching encounte ah, is th in rhave write f Arm and tou ague o cently a ersonal Sule, re , describes a p y, an old colle quence, to the ps ke The Elo everal worksho e. Jim McCon ntary on ed in the writer s ome n i m u g m n o e c Pop his seld t sens through se of the h he firs testifies, f principles whic you a rare glimp perb organizer, su w yo durabilit go. We also allo reless critic and ti a e decades ed author, by th h p ra g to , even pho rter. i f fe r e n t nent. o d P h e e r s a ti Abio mpses this con ore e s e g li ects of life on id h t Is d n n e e, a sp Betwe ns on a em, Letter Hom ip to o h ti s c n le o f ti e ry, r s rela 's po l' to h a e ic k tu d c A a le tr l m tu ap red con inte Afa atriated menon c ver a ide with p o -s x n y e e h e -b p e th Sid y on gling disco o's essa ind-bog You will story, Okpewh you have the m Tade Ipadeola. ti voca ve Kola , y e e b , m ” 's o y h n ll t u u t g tha edib nmi Se ine”, the linguis tion ofile, “Ad Om owu h la c s a n in the pr in a M tr n e nsio g th e of a in te v k ti a r ra e r a p il a S n “ sim mmaker g ming”. In us an interestin Sembène, the fil frican o c e m o “H ith of A ane shares w erations n Ousm Tubosun . In his piece o cross three gen lored in Molara a ce . exp experien lu pays a tribute Bamako stylishly re a h o est film, ic t m h o i, la w tt S 's e f e o n o k k o e S urs n B issa e conto mane S d Mahe artists, th iew of Abderrah ean Jacobs an n Film Festival, rev Africa een S ship Wood's tion betw nnual New York mplex relation a rs e v n o o — a c c e e ts is th h c T f je f th irector o eir sub count o -d th r c e a d d n g n u a in o o f ls an on-g tellectua provides frican artist-in may be. A se between nd wherever tho a r e whatev

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author ey is the ouse k n o cC M f James Tree H e d it o r o . ads, The f Crossro The Novels of E.M h is th e a u t h o r o f o r it t e n e k w A s a m h , fa s d A n A d o o n i o a s To s W , mory ri ti n g Confe H is M o la r a culture in urt of Me r A fr ic a n W m e n ts (1 9 8 8 ). arts and orster, Co d, and many othe n i o F M d widely on c a n m e d i a . A e n r u le t a n to r S la o fe Is ss i n t fe r , n e s pro Dista s be arafina and the Af is emeritu University w o r k h a n d a n th o lo g ie s, e ibutor to F short H tr n . o c ks o r o la b a regu and rnalism at Cornell jo u rn a ls S. , poems veral jou of English , N e w Y o r k , U her essays v e a p p e a re d in s won se s.“Letter Home” a h e a h c a a h rd h t g a I n i w n a d g n n io i i ry in c lu fict and litera oem of his forthcom b l i cat io n s ic and n. tle p m a ny p u a , E c le c ti c a , I n o ti d e n th Lo is n academ t, h g aster Lig Jacobs is a tive of Cape E n m a C h im u re n w, and Per Contra. o e S fr k o bo vie . A na Posse Re d works in London, journalist c u rr e n tl y s p e n d s n a e s d h ve li , She To w n ooklyn an etween Br re he is b e im , t r England. is te h e n wri r, US, wh s o r o f poet, fictio Ann Arbo He has fes E. Sule is a ary journalist. He o t. . r e E o p p a t n is ola liter a s s i s t a t io n S t u d i e s a n d Tade Ipade ed collections of critic, and ican Literature and a h is l fr C o m m u n ic c a n a n d A f r i c a n (2000) two pub teaches A riting at Nasarawa e ri e of Signs 5). A m im T -A editor . W o A a i fr y: r A ve poetr Creati the online s Leo , Nige s y i rdel (200 t a i e F rs H e in s. a v i R ie , n Stud etry blogs a and The S ta te U e o f p o e is renga and m u u m l i o h v C f o d H thir l gress. us. rofessiona is, is in pro live s in un is a p children African Anastylos g e d S n i a m t, r, n u ye w th w o o la b m r O a a novelis fo s also o write hird ewho is h T p r. w k . a e l n O ia h o a r i T e h r g re a i sc r o l, N lib Isid erary r nove Ibadan, u is t , dults. He NA prose prize in poet, and oral lit professor of g a n i d l n a a s the ntly a on the A bosun i d author Dimple, w as shortlisted for for He is curre rican Studies and K o l a Tu usiast, an h w t e n e e d m e z a n A ri y , a P g ters 1991 re at th African Meddle technolo e alth Wri e Literatu nto the n) in i t w v o a i n ti t e g o a s h r r rk t re m a fi o p Y d m is a o m ca C Co of He of New ok (Afri n y o e it ems. He B e o rs b t p e e s v d i r i f ve u n F d l a o an ies h Best State U ooks inc collection guaBoard short stor . on. His b The Last on r of Lin 1993. Her various anthologies Binghamt ), 0 7 9 1 moderato h online forums ( in a ms bot published The Victi ), Epic in Afric duated a r g e Karaole, H 6 . d 7 e n 9 g a 1 a ( ) u 2 d g 8 n n ty n a 9 a u la D Africa (1 of Ibad a writer in issues of s i h ty t i 3 y u s l 9 r o 9 M e , 1 v m ) Uni the (1979 ans a d a Seke So from the se work sp awarde hich won s Prize for o h w s w , a r s e w e k a rt d i s T er he filmm ion ng sho ealth Writ where dia includi oundat Commonw in tary, riety of me thur F n s e r e va v m A li c cu o e a d H , M 5. video Africa. ip in 200 a an d film, music Scholarsh ls, TV dram a ci r e m e m th TV co d by Ibadan. e is inspire human theatre. H d n a of truth loved t s i y a su r lw u ll settle a p i w s ling that Etomi ha rks with a ght but fai o si Enimien n w rn and i o e b h s S a tures. ey. He w ny in n a o p m m r taking pic co o f s w h e re h e unication i n La g o s , wed at ie d v se e i telecomm a b r rn. n r work ca live and lea ntinues to Lagos. He om. .c co ce n a h tterc etomi.shu

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ISSU PHOTOGRAPHY: Molara Wood, Lanre Lawal CARTOONS: Gado, Lanre Lawal REVIEW: Toye Gbade GRAPHIC ART DIRECTION: Lanre Lawal Ayi Kwei Armah photograph courtesy of Abioseh Michael Porter Ayi Kwei Armah quote culled from “African Writers as Practicing Craftpersons in a Time of Chronic Social Crisis”, ALA Bulletin: A Publication of the African Literature Association, Vol 29, No 3, Fall 2003/Winter 2004, p. 85.

LETTERS LETTERS

The Hottentot Venus

Dear Farafina: Your excerpt from Rachel Holmes' Book was magnificent ["The Hottentot Venus," by Rachel Holmes, issue 11, November 2007]. It read as a history lesson and demonstrated to me — yet again — that racism is an ever-present evil. As a medical doctor myself, it appalled me to discover that Georges Cuvier, the founder of comparative anatomy, said this when commenting on Africans: “These races with depressed and compressed skulls are condemned to a never-ending inferiority...[Saartje's] moves had something reminding [one] of the monkey and her external genitalia reminded [one of] those of the orang-outang.” This from a man who has been described as possessing one of the finest minds in history! It was the same Georges Cuvier who, after Saartje's death, made a plaster model of her brain and preserved her buttocks and vagina to be displayed at the Musee de l'Homme. Given the amount of time it took to retrieve Saartje's remains from this ‘venerable’ museum, I would contend that the view expressed by Monsieur Cuvier is still very much a prevalent one. On the day that the legislation that allowed Saartje to be released to the South Africans was passed by the French government, a top French goverment functionary, RogerGerard Schwatzenberg, said: “Saartje Baartman was firstly a victim of the exploitation suffered by South African ethnic groups during colonisation. Secondly, Saartje Baartman was the victim of colonialism and sexism because her dignity as a woman and her rights were denied. Thirdly, she was also the victim of racism which was the characteristic of anthropology at the time...” Damn right! I say to this. And I ask, has anything changed, really? Eretoru Dagogo-Jack, M.D. United Kingdom

Lost in Translation Dear Farafina: I got Farafina 10 one week ago. It is my favourite among the numbers that I got up to now (since May 2007). Not only because of its content, but also because of its outfit (graphics and design). For me I found a lot of eye-opening and lightening articles in it — but maybe I have to mention that I might be the only subscriber that you have that is neither Nigerian nor black but just very European and Swiss. But I am sure that the Western world would be surprized about the avantgardistic style and the innovative approaches to African societies and self-understanding that I find in your magazine and I really hope that I am not the only European reader that you have. Please excuse my English — it is only my third language (I am of German and French mother tongue). Francesca Müller-Höselbarth Switzerland

DECEMBER

Dear Farafina: I count it tremendously expedienture to get in touch with you through this mail written of mine. Sir, I came to notice your existance and your wonderful goodness to mankind. I was really touch to write to you. You are so special, people that are remember are those that brings joy and smile to a soul, you will grow form victory to victory, so shall joy locate you, it is well with you. Please, please, please sir, my main purpose of writting to you is concerning Farafina magazine calling for submission from writers, please, I want to participate, I am good in short stories and essays and so many others. My name is Dingwo Normality, my country is Nigeria. Please sir, do not be offened, is there any price attach to it, please I want to know. Sir, please below is my pictures I attach with, they are two. The first one is my present picture, while the second one is the picture when [I] was a baby. Belove Editor, I do not know what to said again. I am cut off with words of what to said. “God shall ever and ever and for ever” rest his blessing that will not ease to follow in your life. Dingwo Normality Nigeria

Letters to the editor should be sent by email with the writer’s full name and address to letters@kachifo.com. All other queries should be sent to info@kachifo.com. The magazine reserves the right to edit submissions, which may be published or otherwise used in any medium. All submissions become the property of Farafina.

Home, Exile, and the Spaces in Between By Isidore Okpewho

ot long after the explosions at the Nigerian Army munitions depot at Ikeja, Lagos, in early 2002, I spoke over the telephone with a sister-in-law living in the city. I had called to enquire about her and a few other relatives of ours who had been affected by the accident. She and her immediate family had narrowly escaped it, but two of those I enquired about were not so lucky. Although they had suffered no personal harm, the house of one of them had completely collapsed while the other's roof had caved in. Naturally, I was thankful that their lives had been spared. But it was disturbing enough to think their names could have been in the shocking list of casualties released by the Nigerian authorities. In the days that followed, I was to hear of even more acquaintances who had suffered various levels of loss, even death, in their families.

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I believe that many scholars and other professionals who have relocated to the U.S. would agree with me that, whether or not we are directly affected by these tragedies frequently reported from our continent, they generally have the effect of painfully deferring our cherished hopes that sanity would someday return to our land of origin. Worse still, every time such sad tidings come from home, it is hard to avoid a certain sense of guilt about the fate of those we have left behind. We are lucky enough to have escaped the depressing conditions back home and found a safe haven here, where we have an opportunity to raise our children and pursue our professions. But while we may not be directly responsible for those acts of social and political mismanagement by which our leaders deny our people the basic rights and securities of life, we cannot help feeling that, in fleeing our countries we have left our relatives and friends to their devices in increasingly insufferable conditions. I have no doubt there are some among us who, having given up hope that normalcy will ever return to their country, have decided to erase all memories and links to the past and build a new life for themselves here. But those who retain

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Living and working in America has, therefore, helped many of us to achieve a certain sense of fulfillment by providing us the resources, degrees of intellectual growth we had only distantly craved in Africa. Yet the irony here is that having so much at our disposal makes us equally sad to think how many of those we left behind, especially the students, would wish they had even a modest share of these resources.

ESSAY I Isidore Okpewho

the stubborn hope that sanity will someday prevail will need to reexamine their scholarly preoccupations and see what they might do towards aiding that goal. A few decades ago, it was possible for a writer who felt his work had done nothing to arrest his society's drift towards chaos to attempt a more practical solution — like holding up a radio station or taking up arms — however ill-starred such a step turned out to be. But the conduct of affairs in many an African nation has become so demonic as to discourage any illusions by the citizen of exercising honest conscience, let alone of challenging the government's authority in any regard. Which is why some of us have fled our countries to settle elsewhere. However, even if we cannot directly influence the conduct of affairs in the continent, we can at least begin to ask the kinds of questions that may not always have been part of the rules of our disciplinary engagement but that will help lay the foundations for a morally responsible order of existence in the future. We should begin to nurture a new generation of scholars who will not flinch from questioning the assumptions underlying the ideas fed to them, the way their predecessors were seldom inclined to do. What I am calling for is nothing short of an ethical agenda in our investigative labors. For those of us in literary study, this will mean that we retreat a little from our pet propensities toward theories and modes of discourse that may have advanced the horizons of humanistic study but that have proved woefully incapable of creating the climate for a humane conduct of affairs in the world in which we live. In my more recent study of tales of empire in my part of Africa, I have taken a close look at the logic of traditions we have grown so accustomed to celebrating that we are unaware to what degree they have woven themselves into systems of political engineering that are responsible for much of the instability that plagues us today. Even if we allow that there is no more than a mythic or symbolic import to many details in these traditions, we are at any rate justified in questioning the logic of the powers claimed by our epic heroes and the fate of communities that find themselves at the receiving end of their whims. We are justified because, in the post-independence record of indigenous African governance of nearly every African nation, we find the same capriciousness in our real-life leaders — Mobutu, Banda, Bokassa, Amin, Abacha, to name a few — that we find in the legendary ones, and wonder by what unkind fate the lines between myth and reality so easily blur in Africa. What I am castigating here is not so much history or tradition, about which we can do nothing now, as the uses to which they have been put by African leaders in the sociopolitical dispensations of our day. The problems we all face, whether we are scholars reflecting on epic texts in the comfort of our study or peasants on whom the cost of our leaders' whims rests far less easily, are too real for us

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Home, Exile and the Spaces in Between

to pretend that the epics we celebrate have no bearing on our present condition. This does not mean we should stop collecting epics. It only means that, in studying them whether as literary or cultural legacies, we also ask questions that might help our people address problems of today created by the fault-lines of history. The fault may lie with outsiders who imposed certain systems and outlooks on us. But it may also lie with ourselves. I began these reflections by lamenting the conditions that forced many of us to leave our countries and seek refuge in the United States and elsewhere in the West. But I really should acknowledge that it is precisely this condition of exile that has enabled me to see my scholarly preoccupations in a broader perspective, especially in terms of appreciating the continuities between the traditions of Africa and the African diaspora. I believe I can say, with some degree of certainty, that scholars in a country like Nigeria are severely limited by available resources in the scope of investigations they can pursue. The result of this is to render the curriculum in the university departments unduly parochial in their outlook. For instance, at the English Department of the University of Ibadan which I know best, African American and Caribbean literatures have for about three decades had the status of compulsory courses at both undergraduate and graduate levels. But even with the best of intentions, scholarly and pedagogic efforts in these fields have been rather token, due to a dearth of materials and of incentives for growth. Those scholars who have the occasional opportunity to travel out may come home with a few books and articles, but the climate in which they return to work hardly encourages anything like an extended dialogue with the intellectual culture from which they have brought home those articles. Living and working in America has, therefore, helped many of us to achieve a certain sense of fulfillment by providing us the resources, degrees of intellectual growth we had only distantly craved in Africa. Yet the irony here is that having so much at our disposal makes us equally sad to think how many of those we left behind, especially the students, would wish they had even a modest share of these resources. Now and then, we hear that someone or other in the academy has left to pursue a lucrative position in a multinational corporation or a political post at the state or federal level, putting an already impoverished situation so much deeper in starvation. In a sense, then, the intellectual famine steadily destroying our institutions is comparable in scale to the periodic tragedies — bomb explosions and all that — that claim lives in the general society. The point I am urging here is that, however challenging our investigations of cultural and other

continuities between Africa and the diaspora may be, we cannot justly ignore the political issues in which such efforts are imbricated. And it may be well for us to recall that these studies have their foundations in the work of black intellectuals and activists like — DuBois, Padmore, James, Blyden, and others — who saw the liberation of the race as basically an ethical duty and drew no lines whatsoever between their intellectual and political charges. If we can only recognize that there is something fundamentally wrong in the conduct of affairs in Africa, we should commit our intellectual and other energies to an agenda of restitution. It is not enough to send books to university libraries or even to reorient our analytical strategies in a more radical direction. Nor is it enough for our disciplinary associations like the African Literature Association and the African Studies Association to make such solidarity gestures as holding periodic conferences in “safe” countries on the continent. We need to go further by actively lending our support to initiatives undertaken, at various levels and forums, whether by the United States government or by international organizations, to hold African governments down to their obligations to create a healthy atmosphere and humane conditions for life and work in their countries, and to impose severe restrictions (especially of funds and movement) on governments whose records (in human rights, probity, etc.) are even remotely questionable. If we continue to pretend it is not our business that electoral rules are juggled and elections rigged with impunity by incumbent governments, that justice ministers are assassinated and few questions are asked by the relevant authorities, then what is the real goal of our interest in Africa? We have usually designed convenient tags for identifying the continent's political, cultural, and other stages of experience: precolonial, conflict of cultures, postcolonial, etc. Perhaps we are waiting for one or more of its countries to self-destruct before we can find the right tag for its after-life? It will be clear, from the above reflections, that I am the kind of exile that the late Edward Said in his book, Representations of the Intellectual, described as “exist[ing] in a median state, neither completely at one with the new setting nor fully disencumbered of the old.” On the other hand, one

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does not really need to be an exile to appreciate the ugliness of the conditions that prevail in many an African country today. I admit that having grown up in Africa makes me more sensitive to the deterioration of things than one who never lived there. But if we are all in the business of making a living from studying Africa, it really makes little difference which one of us calls for the sort of critical orientation I have recommended here. If we are not part of the solution, we are clearly part of the problem. A version of this article appeared in Research in African Literatures, Vol. 37, No 2, Summer 2006. Used by permission.

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ESSAY I Isidore Okpewho

â&#x20AC;&#x153;What can writers say, according to our traditions, about resource use and development? That resources are to be kept, not thrown away. That small amounts of them are taken out carefully, and people work with them, processing them to create the materials needed by society, in return for the wealth to live on.â&#x20AC;?

Ayi Kwei Armah 10

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AyiKweiArmah The African Revolutionary

By Jim McConkey

bout 25 years ago, Ayi Kwei Armah was a visiting writer at what is now called the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. As a member of Cornell's creative writing staff, I was introduced to him. He is one of the few people I've met — most of them writers — with whom I at once sensed, rightly or not, a spiritual affinity. My wife and I invited Ayi Kwei to dinner at our country house, and we exchanged recent books — the one he gave me was Fragments — and later I attended a lecture on Marxism he gave at the Africana Center. In advance of the talk, he told me he was at odds with the majority of the Center's faculty, for they were Marxists, while he felt that Africans needed to find the solutions to their problems through their own traditions and culture and not through any imposed Western ideology, whether capitalistic or Marxist. The lecture he gave was carefully reasoned, never emotional in nature. The faculty listened to it politely, but with the reserve that means disagreement. Aware that Ayi Kwei would leave Cornell if he had to remain at the Center, I secured my department's permission to offer him an appointment with us — though, as a necessary act of courtesy in matters of such a transfer, we would need the Center's approval. Ayi Kwei objected to that provision; the day after I told him of it, he abruptly terminated his position, leaving Cornell for an undisclosed location, perhaps his native Ghana. Though I regretted his departure, I could see that it was in keeping with his character. I had found him to be a person of rare moral integrity, one who would never bend his views to conform to the desires of any group or to advance his career. I've just read Ayi Kwei's most recent book, The Eloquence of the Scribes, for the second time: a book so unusual, so vast in scope — it is based on years of reading African historical texts, tracing their literary beginnings to

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ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics — deserves the best reading one can give it. Throughout, it remains a model of lucid prose and contains, as a kind of subtext, elements of his autobiography. I was fascinated particularly to see how consistently Ayi Kwei Armah has maintained the positions as well as the personal character I found in him during his brief period at Cornell. Though too individualistic — and perhaps as a young man too innocent — to become the kind of revolutionary for a united Africa he once wanted to be, he still reminds me of Simon Bolívar, who wanted to unite another continent. In final defeat, Bolívar famously acknowledged, “I have ploughed the sea,” but Ayi Kwei, who has learned that the changes he advocates will not take place in his lifetime, continues to do what he can, patiently and without disillusionment. He has been instrumental in establishing a publishing cooperative for African writers, one that would free them from profit-taking and editorial constraints of the European and American publishers, whom — from personal experience — he indicts for continuing the greed-driven tactics of the European powers once in control of the continent. And, as part of that cooperative, he participates in teaching, at the cooperative's center in Senegal, workshops designed to impart mastery of technical skills to promising African writers’ workshops similar in nature to the graduate writing programs in American universities. (For that matter, the crass commercialism of publishing conglomerates has led writers in the United States and elsewhere to form similar cooperatives, which surely have affinities with the goals of democratic socialism.) But Ayi Kwei and the other founders of this cooperative and its workshops trace the origins of both to institutions in ancient Egypt that of course long preceded those of western civilization. The Eloquence of the Scribes would be an ideal text for the young writers the cooperative is training to become voices of a generation more skilled, more liberated from exterior influences, and more aware of the possibilities of a cohesive Africa, than the present one.

slation Experience A Personal Narrative of a Tran

Speaking The Machine By Kola Tubosun

ell, I've had a few brushes with language translation one way or the other before now. One of them was the task Professor Egbokhare tossed to our group in the lexicography class second semester of my third year in the university. There he had challenged us to find equivalents of technical terms in electrical electronics in our mother tongues, specifically those terms that had never before been translated or brought into common usage. That was all we needed to do to graduate from the class. Initially, that was (for me) a back-breaking trial-by-ordeal which would only end with my expulsion from the class, because there's absolutely no way I would be able to express all those technical words successfully and sufficiently in Yoruba! Or so I thought until we began. I remember it now because it was the recall of my success at that task that finally had me taking up a translation job with a global telecommunications/mobile phone software company, pretending for some time that I hold the language in sufficient grasp to use it in a way acceptable to millions of others around the world. I grew up between opposing philosophies of indigenous art and maternal insistence on English education, probably best demonstrated by a rude intervention of my father which I had always remembered with some unexplainable shivering and a smile.

LANRE

He came to my class on one of his regular checks at school. The class pupils had stood up in unison to chorus their Good mooooorning sir! Welcome to our class… and other memorized welcoming chants, which was expected, when he suddenly looked lost, brought a smirk on to his face, and replied, to my chagrin, and to the hilarity of the whole class, “Èmi ò gbó èèbó o.” Sorry I don't understand English! He was of course only being mischievous. He was the one I knew who until then was as meticulous about spoken English as he was about spoken Yoruba. But at that moment, only my desk and the ground under me bore the brunt of my horrified shuddering, as I wondered why he had chosen this moment to give me a totally unexpected and undeserved public ridicule. He had surely intended it as a personal statement of some defiance, but I did not find it at all complimentary in context. Why, I could not explain, except worry that I had suddenly acquired the image of the only one in class whose father did not speak English. The

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ESSAY I Kola Tubosun

Speaking The Machine

class recovered from its hilarity after the initial double-take, and chorused: “E káàro sir…” Satisfied, he waved them off with a gesture, and went on about his business with my class teacher. Later, I would ask him why he thought that those eight year-olds in my primary three class were the best audience for his curt lesson in indigenous language usage. After all, I didn't mind that he had an occupation that I would not likely be found boasting about amidst those cheeky classmates of mine: My father is an Akewi. Didn't you hear him on radio yesterday? He runs his own programme on BCOS every Saturday morning… But to shake my pride in him as an educated and refined man was not one I would easily forgive. I have since wondered how much impact our insistence on local language usage would make on a gradually computerised world. Many years later, at the end of that semester at the University of Ibadan, my course mates and I had not only translated words like frequency, oscillation, volt and electromagnetic force into Yoruba, coining new expressions along the way, we had gone from electrical electronics into mechanical engineering terms, and itching for more to do, even contemplated enlarging the scope of the assignment from a mere hundred words to twenty thousand! Time however put an end to that white-elephant thought. We left the university and went our separate ways.

LANRE This recalling helps me adjust to the presumption with which I had agreed to take the trans-Atlantic phone call, sometime in May, during my National Youth Service, from a linguist in Massachusetts, USA, who, on receiving a translating contract from a linguistics services company based also in the United States, had started to search for another linguist, one who was adept at Yoruba, to accept to undertake the Yoruba aspect of a large multilingual translation task for the American software company, trademark owners of a popular global software on mobile phones. Being Igbo, and a PhD holder resident in America, he was most appropriate for his part of the task. But I! My only resource the internet, a fresh graduate and barely settled Youth Corper only lucky to have been informed, in passing, of the opportunity just a few days earlier! With bottled up excitement no doubt showing in my voice, I counted myself lucky as I discussed the terms on the phone, confidently giving my word, and finding it hard to restrain my impulse to jump. Thus, my first thoughts were fearlessly euphoric. This has got to be good. I will do it, no matter how much money is offered. A chance at last to test my ability in unsupervised translation, to prove myself, or finally deflate that private pretence to omnipotence in Yoruba language usage. Let's see what I can do. I can do it. I will do it. What I hadn't prepared myself for was the enormity of the work I was expected to do, and to complete in less than a week. When I opened my email inbox the following day and got the file, all zipped up into one folder — about twenty-six files in Microsoft Word format — I panicked, at first daunted by the size and the range of the job: racial slurs; religions of the world; months of the year; chat room abbreviations; traditional foods; cities, countries and nationalities; days of the week; holidays; festivals; alphabet; basic words; common names; diacritic examples; greetings; profanity; prefixes and suffixes, and many more. It was easy to get daunted. The task was great, and this not surprising. A file was attached for me to fill in the time spent on each task — this for ease of calculating payment.

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ESSAY I Kola Tubosun

Speaking The Machine

What was intended as one day's job eventually stretched into a week. This was to a large extent a result of having to travel nearly two hours everyday to the nearest cyber café and then hurry back before dark. I also had to report everyday at my place of primary assignment — a government secondary school, where National Youth Service Commission had me teaching English language and literature. Though I usually set out early on my trips to the cyber café, I would leave later than I liked on those days that I had classes with my students — most to whom English language was still a foreign language, an unnecessary punishment in secondary education, foisted for no good reason on a people whose primary means of communication was the Hausa language. I was more the fool to have harboured some hidden hope of making them develop a fondness for the subject, and actually improve their usage of the language within the one-year space of my internship there. It was not easy work, and it was made even more tasking by the habit of the school's own staff to choose no other language with which to speak to the students than Hausa, even during school hours. Not wanting to be judgmental except to the extent of their infringement on the ease of my work, I thought about the irony of the situation. Here was a bold and total embracing of the local tongue to the exclusion of any other foreign language of imperial nature, while I, the outsider, was the one to whom excellence in the use of English (a colonial tongue) was of as much importance, maybe even more, as proficiency with the mother tongue.

LANRE

Alas, the irony was not to be lost on me when I headed home every evening from the cyber café, turning the day's translations in my head, especially as would I go on pinching myself in an agonizing effort to remember how to best express an English statement in Yoruba. Think, think. Does “They have cancelled his flight” really translate to “Wón ti sún ìrìn àjò rè síwájú”? or “Wón ti cancel flight è.” Isn't “Wón ti sún ìrìn àjò rè síwájú” the direct translation of “They have postponed his journey”? Think, Kola, think! I would push myself back and forth in thought, knowing the futility of it — trying to force out a simple Yoruba thought from the subconscious mind almost totally anglicized. To switch, to think in a language other than that of school, books, and the elite, would not prove to be an easy one at all. Not in the least when even the people in and around the bus conveying me from Jos town spoke Hausa, Berom or English when they were not speaking other local dialects. How does one summon words at will in this kind of environment? The words, when they would finally come, like an epiphany, would drop in gently in the middle of the night when the mind was free, and the earlier errors would be striking: “Wón ti fagilé ìrìn àjò ofurufú rè”. (It would dawn on me that I was beginning to lose my mother tongue — an unavoidable consequence of the fact that one couldn't take the path of stubborn defiance and continue with the usage of Yoruba even in the midst of strangers who did not understand it.) I would jump up from bed to write it down. It would not be until the next day, online, when the opportunity would come to correct the mistake, and to continue to another task, but knowing full well that I would never escape from the reality of getting stuck again. Writing, as in speaking any tonal language, requires adequate mastery of the tone patterns. For example, “oko” written in Yoruba without the tone markings will mean any one of vehicle, penis, hoe, husband, spear, stone or farm. Using a computer presents its own unique kind of problem: finding the means, and the patience, to correctly place

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ESSAY I Kola Tubosun

Speaking The Machine

tone marks and sub-dots at their appropriate places on each word. This was the hardest part of the task as I could not find any computer with a fast enough means of typing Yoruba tones with the least number of keystrokes. Here I remember ALT-I and its experiment with a project aimed at creating a Yoruba keyboard — one that would greatly reduce the number of keystrokes used to type a single tonal or sub-dotted vowel. When the software application was launched with fanfare in August 2004, during the West African Languages Congress (WALC2004) Conference in Ibadan, it brought with it a collective sigh of relief. With Tunde Adegbola and Francis Egbokhare in the driving seat behind the concept, linguists and other practitioners in related fields had nothing more to fear. The sky was the limit; I had even begun to imagine myself tapping away at a manuscript in Yoruba without any worry in the world about the problem of the computer's tone-devilry. But that was then. The Yoruba Keyboard was launched, and I — having left the locality of the great dreams I shared with its proprietors while I was a member of the LOC, and webmaster of the WALC Conference, heard nothing more about it. I stared at the computer, sitting in a cosy cyber café in Jos, and almost losing my mind at the possibility of not being able to continue with the project on the basis of this deficiency, I traversed the world to Birmingham (via cyberspace) where a colleague, Anja, another participant of the WALC2004 Conference — with an abiding interest and some fluency in African languages, made the suggestion to use asterisks where the sub-dots should be so that her computer would later replace them with the appropriate signs. I chose that moment to wonder why ALT-I had hesitated to deal with Bill Gates when the “Yoruba Keyboard” was invented, and thus accessed the global reach of his Windows Operating System. What Tunde Adegbola had told me in response to my raising this question was that we did not have to depend on the Bill Gates of the world to make our own indigenous technological statements. We must take it into our own hands, he had said. That admonition, as I rummaged through Windows in vain for help, only got me grumbling. For tone marking, Anja advised that we use the old-fashioned three-stroke combination of CTRL + `+ <vowel>, which eventually worked too, though not without some problems at first. So whoever looked over at my computer screen during my long hours at the cyber café would have seen me typing expressions like o*kò* bò*gìnì, è*sìn Kò*nfus*íánì, Ìjo* e*ni mímó* Ìke*yìn, Nó*mbàa è*ro* ayárabíàs*á rè* ni 206-555-0000 and concluded that I was indeed mad, or engaged in some shady code transmission. Translating religion was, indeed, enlightening! From Baha'i to Buddha, from Confucius to Christ, I walked in the path of the most famous historical figures in religion and knew that I would never remain the same again. Not even the most unappreciative of them would ignore my quest to understand what they had believed in and professed to millions, in order that I would find the best words to describe their teachings to those multitudes in my backyard who speak only one language, the second largest language of the most populous black nation on earth. The internet was of great help in this regard. I would look up a word, take Upanishads for example, read up the meaning, and then think out the most appropriate translation for its rendering in Yoruba. Here is a word I had never heard of in my entire life, but which was the name of documents that define the faith of millions of people in Hinduism. The same for Analects, a compilation of the words and thoughts of Confucius. I would however become awed by a more profound wonder, that while I struggled to translate these words to the best of my ability, there existed a large part of my world that would never get to know what these things meant, and would never care. Thus is the nature of thought, religions and philosophies — each enlightening a people with a sustained point of view deemed global, yet itself perhaps not more than a little part of a larger body of thought which lays no claim whatsoever to any impelling significance. Yet, all over the world, wars would continue to be waged on those flimsy bases of superior importance of one creed over another. Thus Karma, Nirvana,

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ESSAY I Kola Tubosun

Speaking The Machine

Siddhartha, Christ, Mohammed, Shiite, Sunni, Roman Catholicism, Lao-tzu and Shintoism, Vishnu, Shiva, Babism, and Confucius himself, all in one day transited from their place in regional history into the very language of Oduduwa, Sango, Obatala and the rest of the gods in the Yoruba pantheon through a means that was not and could not have been conceived of in their ancient, universal — thoughts the computer and the worldwide web. What a wonder these holy men would feel today if they were to walk the earth again. I have owned a mobile phone since 2002, when the GSM network was introduced in Nigeria, and something I have noticed over time is the conspicuous noninclusion of some genuine words in the English language lexicon of mobile phones. Words like albino, bastard, bitch, darkie, clitoris, fag, coitus, fuck, honky, nigger, penis, phallic, shit, whitey, dick, sissy, whore, wop, and a lot more that you would find if you went on a deliberate search — even the word faggot whose other meaning is anything but dirty. It was while I was working on profanities, racial slurs and taboos that I got to wondering if words of such classification would have to be deliberately omitted from the global software to prevent LANRE people from using them, especially indiscriminately. It was of no consequence that whoever had the money to obtain a mobile phone also had the right to type whatever they wanted to in text to whomever else they wished without being subjected to the censorship of a remote software. It wouldn't apply to my work, I thought, as I had supplied all the known “bad” words in Yoruba as required, but with a caveat that although deemed dirty, words for the privates have alternatives that are often tolerated for public usage. Those I also supplied. A word like adófurò, or even okóbó, for instance, though loose equivalents of the English word faggot, and impotent and gay respectively, are still the subject of many publicly tolerated Yoruba proverbs. The software would nevertheless be compiled in a way that would not allow any such words to be used. They would simply not be recognised for usage. So the next time you type in the key combination 3825 in the compose menu hoping to get the f-word in English, you would come up rather with “dual”, then “duck”, in that order, then “eval”, and lastly “dubl” — anything but that word you desperately require, thereby frustrating your compulsion to curse. But if you insist on making a racial, ethnic or any other verbal smear, you would have to type the words in yourself the old-fashioned way. Or just make a call. Then I came to translating the terms relating to transportation. This was where I would discover the real difference between the words train, tram and subway. Although their sense-meaning was similar and they all carried lots of passengers, they traversed totally different tracks, and indeed, actually looked most different. To a Yoruba person however, the three would conjure the same image, and mean the same thing: a car that

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Speaking The Machine

ESSAY I Kola Tubosun

moves on the iron rail, thus okò ojú irin. What about terms in chat messaging? I found words like mileage, insurance, credit cards, reservation, 911, and tourist, each with its particular challenge in rendering to a native speaker. Relief would come after bottles of coke, and some moments off the computer walking on the cold streets of Jos. And the words would come whose meanings satisfied my desire for closest possible equivalent. A deeper sense of relief would come when I finally reached the task that required me simply to write ten male names and ten female names borne by Yoruba people. This was where I got an incomparable satisfaction from the knowledge that my name, however temporary the immortality, would never again be rejected by mobile phones whenever I tried to type it in. First male name: Kolawole. But of course! The shortened form, Kola, already enjoyed safe passage through all electronic spell-checkers due to it being the English translation for our sacred kola nut. Second name, Olatubosun. Third, Olumide… Tunde… Kunle… Olanrewaju… and the other names of my close friends and relatives who were “lucky” to have been remembered in that moment of rapid thinking. Here — as I informed someone by way of refusal when he asked me whether the software company could display my name on their software as a tribute to my effort in the Yoruba language translation — is where you would find my name, as my effort, albeit straining, was not in any way humanitarian. When I finally added up the time devoted to the job, and factored in the expenses accrued in travelling to and from the cyber café, I came up with a figure that would compensate me nicely for the twenty-seven hours of internet time I had spent; time spent sitting in front of the computer, racking out my brains. To say that a project like this was enjoyable would be an understatement, the same as to say that I felt proud and elated when I finally translated the last word. That is the sweet satisfaction I would take away to privately savour: that of an effort whose recollection is rewarding and result, tangible. It would not even be equalled by the feel of those green American notes that eventually arrived after a few weeks marked by my deliberate non-waiting and stoic indifference. It was however a shock to realise, on counting the money, that a third of what I was owed had already been deducted by the Tax Agency of the American Government, through the linguistics services company through which I had got the job in the first place. Companies operating in America seem to have the inescapable duty to be tax-deductible for every dollar income, even that earned by a Nigerian living thousands of miles way. My friends would be disappointed that a job of this magnitude did not after all make me a millionaire, though I had never harboured any such vain hope; but, shiv happens — as my phone now chooses to say it, I have now become an American taxpayer. And, what is more, mobile phones now proudly speak my language, and my father (wink wink) would now be proud.

Human Rights Watch, Oc tober

9, 2007 e r a s r e d a e l n Nigerialent and corrupt re so vio heir conduct mo that t bles criminal tic resem y than democra activitnance. gover

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Home is not where you live, but where you are understood. Christian Morgenstern

LANRE

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SEMBĂ&#x2C6;NE: SEMB EFIANT Ă&#x2C6;NE: DDEFIANT THEE LAST TTOO TH By Seke Somolu

man says his morning prayers and says goodbye to his wife before going out to ply his trade as a horsecart driver on the streets of Dakar. He encounters deadbeat customers as well as genuine commercial opportunities; he makes a little bit of money but loses even more. He encounters laughter as well as tragedy. Finally, an injustice in the rich part of town leaves him without his source of livelihood and he returns home to his wife with nothing but anguish and more prayers on his lips. That, in a nutshell, is the plot of Ousmane Sembene's first fiction film, the black & white short Borom Sarret, made in 1963. The film simply and elegantly details a day in the life of the unnamed downtrodden Dakar cartdriver; its intrigues and plot twists are no more convoluted or incredible than the daily privations and struggles of billions of similar working strivers, scratching out

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ESSAY I Seke Somolu

Sembène: Defiant to The Last

Sembene, the scholar, Samba Gadjigo, writes of Sembene's “unquenchable thirst for learning'apprender a l'ecole de la vie' (to learn in the school of life).' As a teenager, Sembene earned his daily bread in mechanic workshops and on building sites, but spent his nights devouring books, films and the stories and folklore of the local culture. Later in his life, whilst working as a dockworker in France, Sembene, according to Gadjigo, “spent most of his free time roaming public libraries, museums, theater halls, and tirelessly attending seminars on Marxism and Communism. He read everything; literature on Marxist ideology, political economy, political science, works of fiction, and history.”

hardscrabble existences in cities and towns the world over. This, for Sembene, was precisely the point. The last two films he directed, Faat Kine (2000) and Moolade (2003) were to form two-thirds of a projected but never completed trilogy of films that Sembene described with the theme 'Heroisme au quotidien' (daily heroism). Speaking with the writer Bonnie Greer during an appearance at the British National Film Theater in 2005, Sembene expanded on the idea thus: “We are talking here about the African continent, and it is a continent going through a crisis… But on the other hand, we have a majority of individuals, both men and women, who are struggling on a daily basis in a heroic way and the outcome of whose struggle leaves no doubt. This is a struggle whose purpose is not to seize power, and I think the strength of our entire society rests on that struggle.” Sembene's films may have deepened in narrative complexity and scope over the course of his career, but the preoccupations he displayed in his first modest cinematic effort were the ones that remained with him until his last works. Ousmane Semebene did not seriously engage in creative pursuits until he was well into his thirties, by which time he was a veteran of World War II and had worked as a mechanic, a bricklayer & construction worker, a dockworker and a trade union organizer. The son of a fisherman, Sembene was born in 1923 in the southern Senegalese province of Casamance. He apparently didn't fit in very well with the life in his seaside hometown and was sent as a teenager to live with relatives in Dakar, then the capital of colonial French West Africa. Sembene's formal education ended around this time but he continued to learn aggressively throughout his life (In an online essay outlining his forthcoming authorized biography of

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But before this period of ad hoc liberal arts learning, Sembene spent two years as a soldier in the French army during the Second World War; conscripted along with other young men from the French colonies. This experience would influence his worldview and his creative work, most pronouncedly in the films Emitai (1971) and Camp de Thiaroye (1988). After the war ended, Sembene struggled to find work in Dakar, before migrating to France in search of better opportunities. It was in the Mediterranean port city of Marseilles that Sembene found a new life as a politically engaged dockworker, and he would remain in France until Senegal attained independence in 1960. In a career that began in earnest in the 1950s, Sembene published several short story collections and novels over his lifetime including Le docker noir (The black docker) (1956), and Les bouts de bois de dieu (God's Bits of Wood) (1960). His writing (and later on, his filmmaking) was driven not merely by artistic impulses but most significantly a desire to reach out to Africans; to teach, inspire and raise social and political consciousness. Gadjigo writes that Sembene “felt alienated by the quasi-absence of 'revolutionary' artists and writers from Africa, the voices of the masses of workers, women, and all those exploited and silenced by the combined external forces of colonialism and the internal yoke of African 'tradition'.” Possibly the most widely broadcast fact about Sembene's creative career is that he turned to the cinematic medium out of frustration at the realization that his books would never gain as wide a readership as he desired due to the illiteracy of most of his target audience. The audiovisual nature of films made issues of illiteracy moot. And so in 1962 Sembene spent a year studying filmmaking in Moscow on a Soviet scholarship. In 1963 he directed his first film Borom Sarret. By all accounts, Borom Sarret (from the French 'bonhomme charet'), as slight and spare as it is, was a significant event when it was released. Here was a film set in Africa, about Africans who speak an indigenous African language, describing the everyday reality of so many Africans. At a time when virtually all media images of Africans were

ESSAY I Seke Somolu

presented through the condescending and derogatory perspectives of European colonial films or Hollywood safari and Tarzan epics, Sembene's little movie represented nothing short of a revolutionary act. With his first feature-length film Mandabi (1968) Sembene kept his focus on the long-suffering urban masses, telling a very funny story about a money order that goes astray, taking along with it many hopes, promises and dreams. In what is perhaps his best known film, Xala (1974), Sembene sharply satirizes the profligate class of Europhilic and Euro-indebted leaders who took charge of the newly-independent African nations. With Guelwaar (1992), Sembene uses a comedy of religious misunderstanding as a vehicle for a savage critique of the structural adjustment programs and international trade laws that continue to place African countries at a grave economic disadvantage. Just as Sembene's film displayed his thematic interests in the lives and struggles of the masses, Sembene's first film also showed his inclination to a simple and elegant film aesthetic. He was never a formally adventurous filmmaker (unlike his compatriot, the very experimental Djibril Diop Mambety who famously played with film language in his movie Touki Bouki (1973), a very different sort of statement about the Senegalese underclass). Sembene's primary interest always lay squarely with the human beings whose stories he staged before the gaze of his camera. Today, the influence of Sembene on the contemporary African cultural landscape is hard to gauge. Certainly, many of the African filmmakers who emerged in Sembene's wake have held onto his ideals of socio-political transformation through realist cinema, but there are notable â&#x20AC;&#x153;dissentersâ&#x20AC;? such as the Congolese director Mweze Ngangura who favours a mass entertainment-oriented cinema over an overtly political or didactic one. As for the many ambitious young filmmakers hoping to spark revolution and mint fortunes with their digital camcorders, Sembene may appear anachronistic if he figures on their radars at all. This speaks partly to a perennial problem facing African cinema: the distribution question. Historically, African filmmakers, especially the Francophone filmmakers like Sembene, have been more commonly viewed and appreciated on the international (i.e. Western) film festival circuit than they have been on their home continent. Forget about having seen their films; most young Africans simply haven't even heard of a lot of these older directors and producers. The era of digital video and satellite television have brought new opportunities for broader dissemination of African cinematic works but much more needs to be done. Sembene himself enjoyed the mobile cinema model, traveling with his films to far-flung corners of Senegal and holding post-screening debates with the audiences about the issues raised in the films.

SembĂ¨ne: Defiant to The Last

are simply and defiantly dedicated to humanity in all its messiness and weakness and contradictions. And even when he was wagging a cautious finger he always did so with generous amounts of humor. Perhaps most strikingly though, Sembene was seemingly unafraid of change or diversity. His final film Moolade (2003) was a rallying cry against the practice of female genital mutilation and in interviews he spoke about the fact that certain traditions that survive today do more harm than good. He implied the need for bravery to break away with the past in those instances where looking backwards prevents us from effectively moving forward. And that was Sembene, passionately dissatisfied with today, always looking ahead, anxious that we get our acts right for tomorrow. At the end of Borom Sarret, the unfortunate cartdriver returns home with not a penny to his name, his cart having been impounded by the police. His wife barely hears his laments, simply handing over the baby to him and striding out the door with the promise that she will find a way for them to eat supper that night. The cart-driver keeps whining to himself, wondering where his wife will find money. But then his voice trails off and the last sound heard on the soundtrack is the infant crying.

Historically, African filmmakers, especially the Francophone filmmakers like Sembene, have been more commonly viewed and appreciated on the international (i.e. Western) film festival circuit than they have been on their home continent. Forget about having seen their films; most young Africans simply haven't even heard of a lot of these older directors and producers...

Sembene's films resonate most deeply because they

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LANRE

Letter home in the fourteenth year By Afam Akeh

Where the largeness of the dream is touched by the smallness of one's England there are travel guilts a wayfarer sheds like loose feathers or discarded skin. The flight so far is full of fret. This island is a perch to many birds, home of sorts to the travel worn, the lost in transit, storied swallows and things out of touch with their beginnings, harried between exclusions and inclusions, tortured by absence, as spoiled for options and yet without choice.

One day grown is soon a decade. What was closest becomes farthest, what was precious, rooted, loving, what assumes presence because always absent. In me the longing glows for the woman who was my beginning, and her man my familiar flesh. I list losses. I claim my gains. The moments of gold and moments of guilt, in places where memory is always loud, between the agonies bottled in silence, between the present and the past elsewhere.

England is not unloved. To kiss the nipple of an English dawn is betrothal not betrayal, is memorial, is the heart content, disarmed by birdsong. One thinks mostly of smells and touch, of Spring on treetops, broadcast voices and memorial roots in a childhood of wonder and dream the certainty through the uncivil war

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that life was English, peace English, the future Cotswolds, English as the rhymes one clung to for life, dreaming beyond the uncivil war, practising English for an English day.

England is not unlived. Cakes, ales but also carnival, England is not only the English. Think of Summer blown across the seas bringing the sounds of other climes, not just birds but the blood of many dead. Much sacrifice in the histories from which some come, bearing their grief and many gifts, a vision of London distant from Trafalgar as the Trafalgar Square.

Pub life, punt life, â&#x20AC;&#x153;inn-keeping with tradition.â&#x20AC;? Alone with dumplings, I seek my face on published surfaces. I am a separate table, I know I am none like me with the ear for my tale. Humour is the unseen enemy, pointing and probing, defining traditions, ruling the tongues of engagement. Suddenly shrunk by the laughter of others to whom I am present and not present a mirror one sees into without seeing, lab rat, cuddly toy, a Christie mystery, something exotic as elsewhere. They are laughing like landlords

POETRY I Afam Akeh

Letter Home

laughing as owners, laughing in English, sharing their refuge in language. Me too I think in English. My laughter is the alien dumpling.

“En-ger-laand! En-ger-laand!” This sense of being owned and not owning, not being English in England, some kind of circus watched every turn, the transitory sun adorable in its setting. Waking as from a dream with a sense of nothing, with the feeling of absence, that vacant road travelled on promise and Earl Grey tea, discounting pilgrimages to the regatta, and the castles and races, football at the terraces - En-ger-laand! En-ger-laand! dressed English by a dream of England the counties never dream of their greens.

Of knowing and not knowing how one is seen or not seen, what is preferred or denied, the secret silences of England in conversation. Interpretations, interpretations… The word out of rank is a declaration of war. So, to silence, ceremony and careful coughs, to the weather those who care, lightning flashes and storms over Dover, skies with burst bladders on mornings of graft and cappuccino, to the safety of rains and remarkable coats (that common comfort in weather talk), to muffins, gardens and estrangement… This sense of having and not having, knowing and not knowing England.

So one dreams of home and sunlight, familiar odours, eternal pasts, common folk and their common talk, a simple lust for days borne entirely by colour and vocal chords children playing, mothers calling, entire streets loud-speaking their wares. Then travellers and tyres, a carnival one grows an ear for, this dream unspoiled until waking to familiar reports. Then broken people, lost causes, death, despair, the stories one mulls over tea and croissants and tears.

Let it be told of this moment in our story

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how the gecko and spider finding no life among their kind, sensing the warmth behind other doors, forsook the wild and fled their own, seeking refuge in a distant compassion, living at the border of their new lives. Let no one detest their choice. Their pain is their chief guide. The road out of death is the first law.

That road also the first lie. Life without death, without dirt. Infants suck at it. Manic monkeys in their wild swings have their taste for it. In Summer light, Bonn Square, Oxford drunks disputing like dons thread their vision of a world without law. But the living is the dying, one day emptied into another, ways of dying or not living, the primal shifting of spaces and times, emptiness also in England as in that distant familiar one imagines now as a dream, another dream.

And sometimes you think you know, sometimes you know you don't. The familiar is not always familiar. What is not soon becomes, then is not, then is, then is not again… Home is not only hearth but also heart, where the breath is, where the wreathe is laid, spaces with remembered voices, tales untold, times without record… home is finally only place but place has the stories of all in it.

Oxford bells gathering the city to lunch. They queue for sushi and sundry fries, sandwiched lives bridging the long distance between the pie and the burger. They come from everywhere with laundered lives, and laughters echoing the differences of silence. Many are lunchtime lovers, friends, substitute families for the hugs frozen in postcards and remembered pasts. In rain or snow, out for sandwiches and more, adopted by a city that cannot feel them, they are home in generous Oxford and also travellers, in harmony but also not. Always the distant country, home is a hunger beyond lunch.

By Omowunmi Segun

louds clustered over the sprawling mass of decrepit houses and winding maze of muddy roads, fading out moments later to expose the dying rays of the sun. As I laboured up the path which led to the bungalow, fenced in with chicken wire at the sides, dark blots appeared overhead, deepening as they spread rapidly across the sky, absorbing the remains of the day. Slightly out of breath, I quickened my pace and made my way to the front of the house, stubbing my toe on the exposed root of a tall coconut tree, distracted by the sound of deep rumbling like the earth erupting at its core. I took out the bunch of keys my grand aunt had given me to unlock the door of the house, which I had just inherited. The first two keys did not fit and the sky looked ready to burst. I was lucky at the third attempt: I dashed into the long corridor which led to the back of the house just as I did as a little girl, running in and out of the rooms along the corridor, tripping over things I could not see because of the heavily shuttered windows and bumping into adults whose voices trailed after me, shouting: â&#x20AC;&#x153;Modupe! Get back here!â&#x20AC;? Usually I was long gone by then. Not much had changed in the twenty years that I had been away, not even the smell of mildew could mask the strong odour of dyed cloth that pervaded the house. I got to the back door, eager to see the large yard that had been the hub of our household activity, and where the dyeing, drying, washing, ironing, cooking, gossiping, disagreements and settlements all took place. I fumbled for the bolt in the semidarkness but realized it was locked and none of the keys seemed to fit. I retraced my steps, hesitating by the front room on the left. I could remember that it was the one room in the house out of bounds to every living soul except for one young woman who came regularly for counseling by Mama Agba, my grandmother. The door was always locked, with the key secure in the knotted end of the wrapper tucked around Mama Agba's waist. I stared hard at the bunch of keys wondering if any of them would fit. After all these years, I was curious but at the same time afraid at what I might discover in the room. As I jiggled the third key, the windows rattled, and the wind moaned louder. It unnerved me, standing there all alone reliving a past that remained blurry. I abandoned any further attempt to open the door and gravitated to the door on the right instead. It opened

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SHORT STORY I Omowunmi Segun

reluctantly, stiffened with age and disuse, to reveal the large parlour where visitors were received. The heavy mahogany chairs and stools were still the most dominant features of the room besides the fading black and white portraits, one of which was of my grandfather in his heavily beaded chieftaincy regalia holding a staff. He died before I was born. The other was of Mama Agba, resplendent in her aso oke buba and iro adorned with shiny metals and a heavy gold pendant dangling on her chest. There was only the faintest trace of a smile in her otherwise stern pose. This was where Mama Agba held weekly prayer meetings with the women from her church group. On those occasions, the house reverberated with singing, dancing, and wailing. Enchanted by the performance, I usually joined in the choruses that sounded familiar to me while waiting impatiently for the food and drinks to be served. Even as I stood there, I longed for the taste of akara, puff-puff, and the steaming bowls of mingau, rich with coconut milk. I wandered round the room, examining objects that reminded me so much of the laughter, the tears, the uncertaintyâ&#x20AC;Ś Something hit the window and I looked out through the windowpane, slightly frosted with age, and observed palm trees in the distance bowing before the superior force of the wind, howling and hurling dirt and stones at will. I backed away from the window, afraid that the raging wind would throw a punch in my direction. As the first drops of rain tapped a rhythm along the roof, I caught a glimpse of the wind ripping apart the flimsy gate of the compound across the road and worried about the damage that could be inflicted on my car parked at the bottom of the badly eroded road which prevented me from driving up to the house. It was obvious that I would have to wait for the storm to abate. It was still early evening, and I had planned to return to my aunt's house on Snake Island on the outskirts of Lagos where I was staying with Gbemisola, my ten year old daughter, who was visiting the country for the first time. Gbemisola, who had been my constant companion ever since I parted ways with her father six years before, had wanted to come along to satisfy her curiosity about all the stories that I had regaled her with about my grandmother's exploits. I missed her irrepressible nature but I also wanted to be left alone to re-connect with Mama Agba whose presence filled the house even in death. As I resigned myself to the long wait ahead, I sat down heavily on one of the mahogany chairs, raising dust and sinking into the soft cushion as I cast my mind to the past. As a child, there were a lot of things I did not understand about Mama Agba and whenever I tried to ask my mother, she would simply clam up. It seemed that there was a lot of tension between the two of them, which probably stemmed from mother's failure to achieve a solid education. Mother dropped out of school to marry a so-called business man â&#x20AC;&#x201D; my father â&#x20AC;&#x201D; who, one day, disappeared without a trace. Family matters were always discussed in hushed tones behind closed doors. Mama Agba had a very quiet but stubborn disposition. She would never argue or grumble like mother was wont to but would passively resist being drawn into long arguments. The remarkable aspect of Mama Agba's life was her entrepreneurship. She set up a huge trade in batik and adire cloth for the export market and supervised an army of women, many of whom lived in the back quarters of our house with their children. She combined this with her role as mediator in family disputes, chair of the local trade and market association, and advisor to would-be politicians. It was generally believed that if you did not have Mama Agba's blessing, you were unlikely to win an election. What was most intriguing was that she achieved all this without

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Home Coming

SHORT STORY I Omowunmi Segun

any education. Mama Agba was a stark illiterate through no fault of hers. She had been ambitious and had started her first year in primary school when she was withdrawn to become the wife of the local chief. She often lamented the fact that she could not even write her name and had to thumbprint on official documents. She relied on mother to assist her with running her business until mother died of yellow fever and I had to take over checking the receipts and ensuring that she was receiving the right quantity of dyes and stuff. I also became her scribe and wrote most of her business correspondence, including one that drew the ire of her suppliers when I ordered a supply of white “flower” instead of “flour”. A clash of thunder followed by a flash of lightning shook me out of my reverie. There was no sign that the storm would let up soon and I wished that I had had the foresight to bring along a torch or candle for it was getting dark and the electricity had been cut off. The shiny brass on the plaque, which had been given to my grandfather for services to the community, glowed in the waning light. Mama Agba inherited this when he died along with other mementoes which caused a furor among her in-laws who accused her of appropriating her husband's property. Mama Agba suffered all the humiliation calmly and allowed her in-laws to ransack the house to their heart's content. They carted off most of the property including some documents she suspected were bank shares. She said she could not be sure of what they took since she could not read the contents of the documents. Mama Agba and my mother (a little girl then) were forced out of the family house with nothing more than a couple of boxes with which to rebuild their lives. To the surprise of her in-laws, Mama Agba made a fortune within a short time. It was then that the rumours started: 'Do you know that she killed her husband for his money?…She is a witch… and a member of a secret cult that suck people's blood…she has a shrine in her house…she turns into a snake at night…she is, she is, she issssssss …' and it went on and on. But none of this gossip deterred Mama Agba from making a success of her life.

Home Coming

that spot, the lightning won't harm you.” My body obeyed even though my mind seemed to have blanked out. When next I opened my eyes, it was morning and the sky was clear. After a while, the surroundings began to register in my consciousness. The room was some kind of study with a desk and shelf of books in the corner with an armchair next to it. A younger picture of my grandfather dressed in a suit was on the desk. I got up, stiff from lying down all night in an awkward position, and almost tripped over a small carton that had been displaced when I bumped into the cupboard the previous night. Its content had spilled out, mostly yellowing, disintegrating papers and documents. Something caught my attention as I flipped through an old cheque-book which had my grandfather's name on it. My eyes swept round the room and I took a closer look at the books on the shelf — English language grammar and writing workbooks. Whose books were these? Grandfather's? Mother's? I took one of the books off the shelf, looked at the first page on which a name had been inscribed, and felt my face split in a wide smile. Mama Agba had deceived us all to safeguard the family inheritance. I looked at the cheque-book in my hand again, shaking my head at the ingeniousness of the ruse. The last cheque for a substantial amount had been forged — the counterfoil was dated a year after grandfather died.

It was dark when I eventually got up to look out of the window, hoping for a lull in the weather. A few lights flickered to life in the neighbourhood. The wind continued to unleash its fury and smashed a tree branch against the window. I tried to move away but remained rooted to the spot. A streak of lightning came through the window, narrowly missing me as it disappeared from the room and down the corridor; the sockets sparked with electricity as it moved about the house. I groped my way into the corridor and could hear the bolt of lightning whizzing its way back towards me. Unwittingly, I grabbed the nearest door before it occurred to me that it was the door to the forbidden room. Unexpectedly, the door yielded to my touch and I crashed into the room, tripping over a cupboard and landing spread-eagled on the floor. I could have sworn that, at that moment, I heard Mama Agba say in a reassuring voice: “As long as you don't move from

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LANRE

Sometimes, home is where you want to be...

PER SESH Writing Workshop:

The African Experience By E. E. Sule

n ancient Egyptian, the word per means “house” and sesh means “writer”. PER SESH then is a house of writers. It is a section in a larger house called PER ANKH, which translates as “house of life.” It is not just the name that is taken from ancient Egyptian, but the concept of writing as it used to be in the glorious civilisation now defunct. The Ayi Kwei Armah-led cooperative group that has founded the workshop desires to project the conception that thinking and writing have been part of African ancient civilisation, contrary to the historical lies the Europeans have fed the world. So PER SESH transcends the mere business of a writing residency. This struck me as soon as I was selected to participate in the workshop. Attached to my letter of offer was a seminar outline containing thirty-six topics, all engaging. Take a glimpse at some of the topics: writing teleology and technology; narrative dynamics: scenes and summary; pace: giving narrative its heartbeat; layout: Quark Xpress and InDesign; cover creation and prelims:

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Per Sesh Writing Workshop: The African Experience

ESSAY I E.E. Sule

Photoshop; negotiating print estimates; and equitable publishing contracts. There was a reading list of fifteen books, classics in African, Asian and European literatures. MacBook Pro, a brand of Macintosh computers used for producing books, with the latest software in book design, InDesign, was provided for each participant to work with. The vision of PER SESH is to give total enlightenment from writing to publishing, and to marketing. It is a vision that Ayi Kwei Armah, the Ghanaian-born world-class novelist, has nursed for a long time. An incurably pragmatic person, Mr. Armah, let's quickly sum up his life story, is a failed revolutionary who found solace in fiction writing. He left Harvard University as a young man with a staggering ambition: to join a liberation movement for the emancipation of Africa and other oppressed worlds. In chapters six and seven of his memoir, The Eloquence of the Scribe, he narrates the frustration he faced at that time, which baulked him from achieving that goal. He thus plunged into fiction writing as an angry young man. This anger is well idiomatised in his first two books, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Fragments. While the anger is the springboard for the scatological imagery in The Beautyful Ones, the angry, frustrated Baako in Fragments is, to repeat a cliché in the criticisms of that novel, an autobiographical creation. Today, the metamorphoses are clear: Mr. Armah is an aging man, still angry at the lies and the established conventions of the Western world, and is determined to do the best he can to liberate Africa. In the nineteen eighties, he abandoned a well-paid job in the United States and returned to Africa. To him, it was absurd to live and work in the United States when Africa, his dear continent, needed people like him. A chapter in Mr. Armah's life that is a natural catalyst to the evolution of the PER SESH vision is the unending stalemate that has existed between Heinemann, his former publisher, and himself. Tracing his ordeal in the snares of a large publishing corporation, Mr. Armah, in his memoir, refers to Heinemann as “a gang of thieving European rascals preying on African intellectual property.” Up till today, the publisher is yet to settle Mr. Armah appropriately. He has been trying in

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vain to retrieve the copyright of his classic, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. This experience and Mr. Armah's longstanding desire to see Africa emancipated from the clutch of imperialists gave birth to the cooperative group that founded PER ANKH Publishing and PER SESH Writing Programme. In spite of his steady perception that Africa is a victim of colonialism and racism, Mr. Armah did not racialise the membership of the cooperative. The cooperative is worldwide, made up of people interested in seeing Africa's book industry grow; and, more importantly, in rescuing African authors from the profit-bound evils of grandmother-publishers. Until a couple of years ago, t h e m e m b e rs f u n d e d eve r y programme by the cooperative. External and government funding was rejected because the cooperative needed to establish its independence. The inadequacy of this self-funding was that the cooperative pursued its vision at a snail speed. But it was unrelenting. The idea of the writing workshop, in which young writers would be taught how to manage their own intellectual property, had been there since the nineteen-eighties. It got bodied forth with the coming of Mr. Akwasi Aidoo who worked with the Ford Foundation before f o u n d i n g t h e Tr u s t A f r i c a Foundation. Mr. Aidoo is downright practical. He insisted that the most practical way to bring PER SESH into reality, and as fast as possible too, was to take fund from the Foundation. The fund was there to help Africa. With generous funding from TrustAfrica and its major partner, Ford Foundation, PER SESH kicked off. Mr. Aidoo, who has interacted with most African writers, comes through as an art's patron, eager to help young writers grow. In February 2007, his TrustAfrica launched the African Writers' Fund, a fund that aims to effectuate a number of programmes that will help young African writers. The home of PER SESH is a sleepy, seaside village called Popenguine in Western Senegal, a one-hour drive from Dakar. The publishing cooperative has been based here for about two decades. The site is a hilly ground overlooking the sea. It was the waves of the sea that woke me up on my first day in Popenguine. The previous night, Mr. Armah had met Kofi

Per Sesh Writing Workshop: The African Experience

ESSAY I E.E. Sule

Doudou, a participant from Ghana, and me at the Dakar airport. Coming from Nigeria where life, even in villages, bustles with the “agbero” phenomenon (I mean our do-or-die attitude towards life), and noise, whether noisome or not, is part of existence, I woke to the astonishing reality that the only sound I heard was that of the sea waves. I did not hear people talking and laughing loudly, either close to where I stayed or brought in the air from a distance. I did not hear the sound of engine or vehicle. Nor did I hear the noise of domestic animals. But I heard the chirping of different birds. The PER SESH site is bordered by a government game reserve to the east. Besides, the greater part of the PER SESH compound is an orchard. Monkeys visit us from the game reserve. As I write, I can see, through the window, a monkey up there on a pawpaw tree struggling down with a rather too-much-for-me-to-carry pawpaw it has plucked. The people of Popenguine are humble and friendly. It amazes me that in my stay in Popenguine, trekking across the length and breadth of the village now and then, I have not seen two people exchanging harsh words. They greet themselves by calling their “family names” i.e. the surnames. Children are trained to stretch out their hands for a handshake when they meet older persons. I am yet to meet people so honest and modest as the people of Popenguine. But that does not mean there are no ganja-smoking, rheumy-eyed young men; or halfnude, sexy young women with arms and legs as long as those of a goddess. In fact they are many here, and what distinguishes them from those in Nigeria is the agbero phenomenon lacking in them. Another common feature of the village is that Europeans, mostly Frenchmen, own most of the beautiful houses. They also own the hotels and the bars, which are often filled with tourists. It is with dismay I got to know that, not just in Popenguine, most money-making organisations in Senegal are owned by Frenchmen. Kofi Doudou and Mildred Barya, my fellow participants, are likely to agree with me that Popenguine is a quiet village. Miss Barya is a Ugandan. There is also the Senegalese, Aisatou Ka. For now, PER SESH cannot take more than four participants. In the near future, though, it will be able to take eight participants. We are all roomed in one apartment, attended to by a cook, a washerwoman and a cleaner. We have a common room where we meet for meals and discussions. There is a large workroom in a separate block where we meet three days in a week for our seminars. Our seats are in a row, our computers in front of us, while Mr. Armah's seat faces ours, his computer in front of him. The first three months are for the theory of writing. In

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our seminars, led by Mr. Armah, we focus on these components of writing: plot, narrative, characterisation, description, dialogue, themes, imagery, diction, transitions and points of view. Mr. Armah's professorial skills in handling this early part of the workshop are commendable. He avoids references to scholars and writers; he never quotes anything from anybody. Constantly, though, we are asked to identify some of the components from some of the books on our reading list. We are asked to practise by consciously creating the components. The exposition we have from the discussions of the components of writing enables us to prepare a plan of a novel, using the Microsoft Excel. This is how it works: on the Excel sheet, a column is made for each component. Each participant writes in a column how he/she intends to use that component for a chapter. For instance, in the column for narrative, for chapter one, the writer puts all the scenes he/she will narrate in chapter one. In the column for characterisation of chapter one, he/she puts the names and descriptions of the characters in the chapter. For all of us, the participants, this way of planning is new and unique. Mr. Armah takes his time to explain the reason for the plan. For us to be professional writers, which is why we are invited, we must keep writing, and to keep writing means to have a plan. Indeed, in ancient Egyptian PER SESH, the writers sat and wrote every day and they could not have done so without planning. The African concept of writing is thus one that rejects such writerly bunkum as waiting for inspiration to write or having a writer's block. Each of us produces a plan of a novel with a tentative title. We discuss and criticise our plans. Thereafter we begin our first drafting. Mr. Armah's advice to us is clear and consistent: “Keep writing, don't worry even if it doesn't appeal to you.” A story has its ups and downs and it can only be judged when it is a whole. So we keep writing. Each participant presents a chapter every week. We criticise and discuss every presentation. Mr. Armah makes it very clear to us that though every participant is to give useful suggestions, the presenter is free either to take or reject the suggestions. This stage is a time of learning from Mr. Armah. He corrects our errors and insists on standard usage of English and French. While we read and discuss our stories, we are also learning to use the software, InDesign and Photoshop. This is to enable us design our books. The requirement of the PER SESH Writing Programme is that at the end of the nine months, we ought to finish work on our manuscripts, design them, ready for printing. Mr. Armah leads us in this practical work. He designs all his books published by PER ANKH. InDesign has everything needed for designing books of all sizes. Photoshop is the software for designing book cover.

f s o e i c w e i t i lan a t i v r r c . e g t d f t n a n i n t a e e f r a s s e r s u h d u T c o t s t s i : r . d t i e s f c n n i e r a t v p l n ou 's ad onsis n' t i c o h g a d e m b d t ' r n , A n a s g . e n r o r i d M clea t y i r t o r i t w s f s i i d A n p n a e ” e . e s v u K e n o “ d w y e o y g d r o d r t d u o j n w e l a w a e s e b o p p S u p ’ . a y s e h l t l c i n o a o s h E a w h a an is a . c g s t n t t n i i i e t W s i e n r r e . wh p w t p week us n e c a s e p y i k i r d e c i v M t e r d . n r n pa a e o t i p t l e a a c s t h i n c y c e r s i e e t v r v i e p t r i c h s y g e r k u e a o v m h e o t t h t a Arm s tha t is ons, i n u t a s o p e e t i g c e g i e t u r r s f a t p c s l e i j u e f r e r e t us r s n

Per Sesh Writing Workshop: The African Experience

ESSAY I E.E. Sule

Beyond the craft of writing and designing a book, Mr. Armah also teaches us how to contact printers and negotiate contracts. We learn how to get book distributors for our books. The high point of this revelation is being taught the modus operandi of PER ANKH, Africa's publishing cooperative, so that when we return to our countries, we should also found cooperatives. The cooperative system is such that either the members contribute money to fund the printing of a book or a member decides to fund the printing. In the case of the latter, the member who funds the printing, i.e. the investor, is given his/her money back with interests when the book sells. Every member of the cooperative is expected to have an interest in publishing books even if he/she is not an author. When a member writes a book, the manuscript is sent to any member who is interested in reading it and making input. With this system, a book starts and finishes within the cooperative group. At least, each member should have something to contribute to the book intellectually. The cooperative can also receive manuscripts from outsiders if it deems fit. But emphasis is placed on high quality.

a book that I will return to Nigeria. I hope to found a publishing cooperative. I welcome you if you are a writer, a businessman or an intellectual interested in the production of books. But most importantly if you believe that writers too deserve to be rich in the society.

With generous funding from TrustAfrica, each participant is to go home with his or her computer. We are expected to keep writing and publishing our works. We are encouraged to found cooperatives in our countries that will comprise writers and intellectuals who will be willing to contribute to the production of qualitative books. With the cooperative system, a writer does not need to be poor except if his/her cooperative lacks good distribution channels. Mr. Armah is worried that African writers give their manuscripts to European and American publishers only to become poor while enriching the publishers. This, in his view, is why most talented African writers cannot live in Africa. To him, it is not really Africa that impoverishes its writers, but the Euro-American publishers that make millions out of a writer's work and give him/her only a peanut. As a compensation for stealing the writer's money, the publishers make the writer unduly popular by organizing reading tours and other writer's perks for him/her. The publishers can get a talented writer glob-trotting and that is all they will offer him/her. Where the cheating lies, in most cases, is the writer's inability to know how many copies of his/her book are sold, how much money the publishers make out of his/her brainwork. The desire of PER SESH is, therefore, to see that young African writers are able to involve themselves in the process of publishing their books to avoid being cheated. The example of PER ANKH has shown that a writer is indeed rich enough to live on his writing, if he/she keeps writing. Since the nineteen eighties, Mr. Armah has been living on his writing. He publishes his novels, knows the number of copies sold and the money comes directly to him. It is with this ability to write and produce

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Flailing after falling only results in more bruising. Ethiopia

Adedibully: A Dinosaur's Last Dance By Tade Ipadeola

ne day in the year 1967, Lamidi Ariyibi Adedibu, aged 39, woke up from his bed and decided that he would live the rest of his life a teetotaller. He has held his resolve for forty years. Before that fateful day, he drank sixteen bottles of stout on the average. Daily. The year 1967 is also significant in the life of the man for another, much less personal reason. In that year he decided that he would seriously pursue political relevance and power. He was, in his own words, an “errand boy” in the Action Group up until that point. For good or ill, Lamidi Adedibu has been true to himself in this regard also, and Ibadan, the seat of political power in Oyo State, has not been the same. The feat performed by Adedibu in local power politics through sheer resolve is the mental equivalent of becoming a grandmaster playing blindfold chess. Unlike inanimate pawns in the game of chess however, the forty year trail Chief Adedibu has behind him is full of real casualties, who bleed and die. Civil and military authorities never underestimate the man's potential for catastrophe. During the April 2007 general elections, the General Officer Commanding the 2nd Mechanized Division of the Nigerian Army located a Odogbo Barracks, Ibadan, considered it necessary to send a detachment of soldiers to cordon off Chief Adedibu's dwelling ostensibly to “protect” the old man from irate political opponents. The real reason for the troop deployment to Molete, Adedibu's quarter, as widely reported in newspapers during the period, was to contain the threat of thuggery usually coordinated from that place. The grandmaster had a different game plan, as it transpired. Aided by modern technology in the form of mobile phones, the man simply shifted the field of play to Ogbomoso town where his political

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godson hailed from. This godson, Alao-Akala “won” that election, leaving the authorities one step behind in the game. It is instructive to note that general elections were also conducted in France at about the same time as Nigeria, and the French army did not feel any single man or group of men big enough threats to the process to deploy troops. The phenomenon known as Chief Lamidi Ariyibi Adedibu, also variously known as The Strongman of Ibadan Politics, The Alaafin of Molete, The King of Amala Politics, The Godfather at Ibadan, and, lately, Adedibully, reminds one, in little ways, of Field Marshall Idi Amin Dada. At approximately 79 years of age, Chief Ariyibi is something of a relic. He is, however, much more than a common relic. He is a breathing human specimen of a disappearing breed of political dinosaurs. If Charles Darwin had found this man, he would have abandoned his Galapagos for our own. We have a variety here: Olusola Saraki, the brothers Chris and Andy Uba, Orji Uzor Kalu, etc. Peculiar specimen of Homo politicus. Not everything assumes a name, said Solzhenitsyn, and we know he is right. There are phenomena that require a whole new language, a lexicon sui generis. Taxonomy has not yet found quite the right word as nomenclature for the being under consideration. We may begin, however, to have some light regarding our subject when we consider how the man defines himself. There was not always an Adedibu in Ibadan. Indeed, Lamidi is the first known Adedibu in history. Legend has it that as a young man, enthralled with the sway of a less illiterate and much more suave politician called Adegoke Adelabu, the young Lamidi invented a name for himself, a name that plays on the significance of that other, better known and better respected name. If the first Adegoke made a way through his own Red Sea to set his people free, he, Lamidi, would become the deep itself in order to be unfathomable. Perhaps this morph of a man would drown a couple of Egyptians in the process. The Fathometer to sound out the old man who became the sea is yet under calibration. If politics is about who gets what and how, the first major act of Mr. Ariyibi is profound psychoanalytic material. Life, it appears, is one long psychodrama to this man, and he would be his own director. It would not be the last time Lamidi would invent an identity. Sometimes pious and utterly profane for the most part, the “Garrison Commander of Ibadan” became a prebendal overlord with a simple code: that the lion's share belongs to the lion. The last syllable of the invented name became his lifelong obsession. Assuming the role of the Aare Onibon of Ibadan, the man insisted on the right to bear not only the symbol of his Chieftaincy title as would have sufficed most, but the very substance. A gun. And he wielded it with panache all the way to Agodi, the seat of State power, the White House of Oyo State. And it still fits snug in his hands at

ESSAY I Tade Ipadeola

close to eighty.

place works. But I digress. We were wondering how this lion emerged.

The man has proven, over decades, that it is foolish to try starving the tiger on whose back the adventurous attains public office. The inexorable law at Molete is that the hitchhiker is the meal at dinner. A number of ambitious persons, lured by how easy it is to attain political office through the Molete route, have thought to take that route to power and then dump the way-maker. These classes of people have learnt one or two very bitter lessons in the end. The first and invariable lesson, which Molete dutifully drives home, is that you never cheat the Godfather. All pigs must fly straight. The second, which the more reflective may learn, is that there are no short cuts to anywhere worth going. Once, in recent memory, the Speaker of the Oyo State legislative house, stubborn and defiant of the sway of Molete, found himself being manhandled into the cramped boot of a car and taken to Adedibu's lair. At Molete, his misdemeanour was read out to him and a summary trial proceeded in which he was pronounced guilty as charged. His punishment? Countless strokes of the disciplinary cane, administered in full public glare. The Speaker was one of the lucky ones. Several others have not escaped so lightly. They have found themselves in hospitals fighting for their lives and struggling with maimed limbs. Of course, the godfather has consistently denied ever instructing the amala mob to so discipline anyone. It is just one of the many ways in which the freeloaders at Molete pay back any perceived insult to their benefactor. Though there are myrmidons aplenty at Molete, it would be wrong to assume that the sole or even the main method employed by Adedibu is brawn. On the contrary, the godfather is a careful tactician and strategist. The court at Molete is serviced by realtors, geologists, economists, statisticians, engineers, doctors and lawyers. One can say, without much fear of contradiction, that one of the distinguishing elements of the Alaafin of Molete is the fact that no other gladiator from Ibadan in more than a quarter of a century is as open to ideas as Lamidi. No other gladiator in the arena has paid as much attention to making peace with the language of government in the locality. It is almost like watching Hitler and his coterie of poets and lawyers. It makes one to marvel, the avidity with which this man assumes the role of the enlightened. In his own crummy way, Adedibully has been most things to most men at Molete. One may well wonder how such a man operating such a system emerged. Not literate enough to read or understand Machiavelli, the Molete overlord has managed a feat that many who have devoted themselves to implementing the precepts of The Prince could not. It is not easy to unravel the recondite logic of how the Molete court works. I once paid a visit, like a tourist, to the compound to see firsthand how the

Adedibully: A Dinosaur’s Last Dance

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Sometimes the apple falls miles from the tree. Those who pointed the way to Lamidi Ariyibi in the beginning could not have imagined that they were creating a Frankenstein. Adedibu tasted the perks of public office early in life by contesting a seat as councilor at Ibadan on the platform of the Action Group. The Action Group, led by the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo and others with socialist leanings, sought to empower those they thought of as diamonds in the rough amongst their followers. Adedibu was one such experiment. He has strayed very far from the ideals of the group that gave him leverage, but today maintains a perversion of the socialist ideal in the form of daily rations of amala and gbegiri soup to callers at his Molete home. His brand of politics is belly-deep. His main expense is incurred in the massive kitchen. The godfather once boasted in an interview that “I do not know how much I spend.” So long as the “masses” are fed from the table of the Strongman. Molete is a theatre of parasites and saprophytes, and the the resident lord of the place a morph between Robin Hood, Nemesis and Frankenstein. Chief Ariyibi started out on a notorious curve in the dying days of the Sani Abacha regime. Having abandoned the struggle to actualize the mandate given to the late Chief M.K.O Abiola, he began to dine with the Abacha junta, though with a teaspoon. This was the first indication that the amala politics exponent was losing the plot. By the end of January of 2006, Adedibu had concluded a bitter impeachment campaign against the governor of Oyo State, Senator Rasheed Ladoja, instantly establishing his notoriety throughout the country. The impeachment was, in the annals of democratic governance in Nigeria, unprecedented in many ways. The bizarre exercise, which was conducted in the most brazen manner, started as a tiff between Adedibu and the governor, his chosen godson of that time, and witnessed street fights, killings and the very first invasion of a state secretariat by thugs, while armed policemen stood by watching. The Commissioner of Police responsible for law and order in Oyo State at the time, Jonathan Johnson, was reported by the newspapers to be in cahoots with the Molete mob. Eighteen out of the thirty state legislators were in Adedibu's pocket; they rooted for the impeachment cause. Afterwards, when the dust of his coup had settled, he granted a newspaper interview where he cited the governor's failure to remit the sum of N15 million monthly to Molete as the reason for the governor's ouster. The Strongman of Ibadan politics doled out millions to the legislators who jumped up in answer to his call. In what will go down in Nigerian jurisprudence as perhaps the legislative proceeding with the most chicanery in it, the eighteen loyal legislators first purported to suspend their thirteen remaining colleagues for failure to attend parliamentary proceedings. They then purported to unanimously impeach the governor.

ESSAY I Tade Ipadeola

Oyo suffered an interregnum of eleven months following the playhouse impeachment of the governor, as Adebayo Alao-Akala, Governor Ladoja's deputy, ran the affairs of state. The Nigerian Supreme Court, the apex court in the land, later restored Governor Ladoja to office in order to complete his term, but the damage had already been inflicted on the social fabric of the state and the fallouts of that original constitutional crisis continue to haunt the state and its denizens to this day. Chief Adedibu predicted the impeachment of Governor Rasheed Ladoja to the day. He granted various interviews to the news media, in which he told the world in no uncertain terms that thuggery, in his view, was inseparable from politics and that he would get Ladoja out of office using that avenue. He made friends in powerful places. As the former President of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was chief amongst them. Obasanjo came to Ibadan on the corrosive campaign trail of the PDP and proclaimed that his bosom friend, Adedibu, with whom he communes in his inner sanctum, was “dry fish.” Anyone trying to make the old man bend would break the old man, it was best to let old men be, and other proverbs along those lines. Such platitudes became the fare among Adedibu's many powerful friends in high places. The ageing warrior of Ibadan is on his last political lap. He knows it and his protégés know it. The most banal display of his notorious influence on the polity has waxed and is on the wane. As is the case for all mortals, eternity has ceased to lend a hand to time on behalf of this man. The Pinochet of Ibadan is fading. Twice in 2007, rumours filtered out that the ailing Adedibu had died. On the two occasions, instant jubilation swept the streets. Improvised songs and dances, text messages congratulating fellow citizens, derogatory epitaphs and symbolic frying of bean cakes to be shared with friends were some of the responses from the citizens of Ibadan. We can only empathize with the immediate family of the man. They cannot pretend to be oblivious of the public perception of their own. Near the end of his long and ambiguous career, the King of amala politics has what you might call a legacy. He has literally installed potentates. As proof, one may wish to consider that whilst the de jure seat of government in the State is at Agodi, Ibadan, the indubitable de facto seat of government is at Molete, in the very compound where Lamidi holds court daily. But the house of cards implodes, the children of the strongman, save one, have all reverted to the old name of Ariyibi. No one, it seems, feels comfortable with the Adedibu brand name. Justifying the May 23 2007 attack by his mob on

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Adedibully: A Dinasour’s Last Dance

the Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State in which journalists were severely beaten, and multimillion naira equipment damaged, Adedibu in a televised interview said he could not allow the governor to use the radio and television stations to communicate his agenda to the state. The Molete mob followed up with the assault on leaders of organized labour in the state who were on a street procession to drum up support for a statewide strike of workers, causing grievous bodily harm to several labour leaders and precipitating the longest strike action in the history of the state. Times are changing. The new Commissioner of Police in Oyo State, surprisingly, actually upholds law and order. The new President of Nigeria, Umaru Yar'Adua, believes in declaring his assets publicly for the records and is not chummy with this strong man who does not know how much he is worth and who has never declared his assets. The strongman has come out to say that his recent visits to the hospital are routine but the world knows the clock is ticking inexorably to a finite point. The last of the Ibadan strong men is ailing. The curtain is about to fall on an era.

Growing old and growing up are necessary in the life of an individual While growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional. Nigeria

- GwendolynBrooks 42

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WORDSBODY/NAIJA UNCOVERED/SEPTEMBER 24, 2007 I sometimes buy Nigerian 'Soft Sell' magazines. Soft porn in words if not necessarily in images, is what they are. If you want to know the lowdown-dirty about Nigerian 'high' society and the desperately aspirational, it's on the pages of these magazines you'll find it. They specialise in lurid headlines backed by salaciously vague details. There is room for everything — from sexual deviations to financial misappropriations to the fashionably clueless celebrated as trend-setters to the macabre. Some seriously criminal things are presented as tittle-tattle and the responsible reader is left wondering, 'Shouldn't the police be interested in this?’ — see the headline about an Army Captain who allegedly bathed his children in acid ('Hey, I am the law!' the Army Captain would no doubt retort). Which politicians have taken blood oaths at which shrines, which society 'Madam' or 'Big Girl' or 'Big Boy' (Big Girl/Boy can mean anything from hotshot businessman/woman to banker-sluts — Naija is the only country in the world where young women become 'celebrities' just because they work in a bank; go figure! — to glorified prostitute to drug baron/mule to kept man/woman to 419 Fraudster/scammer) fought this Big Boy/Girl over which Big Girl/Boy. Confused? Yeah, it can get like that... Nothing is off limits: ritual murders, which tycoon sleeps with his daughter, the lot. The weird and deviously wonderful. Even would-be Imam/Pastor-celebrities get whole pages to peddle their faiths. All done in a fawning way that does not actually offend or alienate any 'celebrity'. Soft Sells love celebrities and the bogusly rich. They are masters of the crude innuendo. Awash with insinuations, often blatantly so. Whenever I want Naija uncovered in all its vainglory, I go to the nearest stockists and get a couple of Soft Sells. Browsing through them on the London Underground, I think how bemused my co-passengers must be at these oddly shaped publications with lurid (sometimes gory) headlines and colours. If I'm feeling shy, I fold the cover page away. The Soft Sells are a genre to themselves, and they mushroom by the week... so people must be reading, including, occasionally me. Read the rest of this blog entry at http://wordsbody.blogspot.com/search/label/Soft%20Sell

CHXTA'S WORLD/VIRUSES AND SPYWARE/OCTOBER 5, 2007 As everyone knows (or almost everyone), one of the biggest dangers of using the internet nowadays is the risk of obtaining a computer virus. By definition, a virus is a very nasty piece of software, something you don't want to have hanging around in your virtual neighbourhood, but something which is almost ubiquitous, especially if you spend a lot of time prancing around dodgy websites, an offence that most guys I've encountered (including yours truly) are guilty of even if not on a regular basis. The original computer viruses were written by enthusiasts who in most cases did their thing just for the fun of it. Back in those days, viruses, worms and Trojans were written by people who were enthusiastic, or who did it for academic study, or who wanted to prove a point, or who in some 43

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From The Naija Uncovered Blogs

http://wordsbody.blogspot.com/search/label/Soft Sell Monday, September 24, 2007 Post

FROM THE BLOGS

cases were just plain bored. Times have changed, and recently, viruses and other malicious programs are being written by seriously big players with resources to keep researching for more vulnerability in your computer. They have an eye on one goal, and that goal is profit. This quest for profit has brought about the creation of 'new and improved' viruses, and in recent times a surge in the rates of infection by Spyware, which to the mind of a security man like myself is infinitely more dangerous than the traditional virus. You see, a virus is nothing more than a regular annoyance which in some cases can crash your hard drive. But to someone who is careful, and who does his back ups regularly, a virus remains just that, a nuisance. However, spyware is a completely different ball game. Imagine Yuri in Vladivostok installing shit on your '247 connected to the internet computer, and with that shit, is able to take over the system and use it for even more shit such as being able to do something malicious to the SAC-NORAD network. If the NSA does a trace route, they'd find that the attack came from you, and you'll be in deep shit while Yuri walks away scot free. But there is worse. Imagine Kola in Lagos installing shit on your system, and his shit just sits there patiently watching your every key stroke, then reporting back to him. Let's say you do a lot of ebay for example, I can assure you that before the day runs out, Kola would know all your passwords, bank details, card details, security questions, the name of your girl friend, whatever else there is to be known, and he can then go on a shopping spree with those details. That is the potential of spyware. Without a doubt then, you must protect your computer with a good anti virus program, and equally importantly, a good spyware program. It helps if the anti virus and anti spyware are bundled together in one package. I must sound a note of warning here though: it is rather unfortunate, but since the virus thing and the spyware thing has become such big businesses, the major anti virus vendors (Symantec for Norton, McAfee, et al) are fighting a losing battle, and they know it. Nowadays there is no anti virus tool with which you can claim with dead certainty that you have absolutely no infection whatsoever. Multiple anti virus tools on your system may be a solution, but the effects of that on system resources are too well documented for that to be a practical solution. Truth is that there are malicious codes out there in the wild that no AV program can detect, and sometimes I wish I didn't know this to be a fact. I am subscribed to SANS, and each time I get something in the mail from them (which can be up to four a day - on a day that is not busy), it's like I want to just curl up in a foetal position and cry. So is hope lost?

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Well not exactly, but we are pretty damned close. During my Christmas holiday in Aberdeen last year I spent a lot of time cleaning up systems, and I encountered AntiVermins on the computer of a friend of Maestro. That spyware is a pretty nasty piece of work. I'd have put a link to the site, but chances are that if the link is there, you're in trouble. To be honest, the guy who wrote that stuff has my respect. Majority of the spyware tools in the known universe failed woefully to remove that thing from the PC, and for quite a while it looked like nothing short of a full system format would solve the problem. I eventually got rid of it by manually working his registry, something I hate doing as it is too risky, but hell, the guy was a paying customer... Thankfully, in the intervening months the world has gotten wise to that monster, and if you check Spyware Guide, there are now tools designed specifically for it. This brings us to the next question, what is the software that one can use to fight this menace? Firstly, I'd recommend ditching Windows, and yes, that includes Vista. You see, most of the nasties in the wild are written for the Windows platform, and unfortunately it doesn't seem that Microsoft is doing anything too serious about changing that except to continue the cycle of releasing new patches all the time, patches which would be compromised in a few days at best, a few hours at worst. Frankly, I'm not confident in Vista at all, after all, I was able to compromise its activation within a few days of its release, and I'm no hacker... In any event, this recommendation won't fly, I know that. Most people love to remain within the comfort zone, and Windows is the comfort zone. In the absence of a complete OS switch, I'd recommend a change to the Firefox browser. Aside from the fact that it's lightweight, it is a lot more secure than Internet Explorer. You can change your default settings so that the browser doesn't retain any information when you close it. Most important, make sure it deletes all cookies after browsing. Cookies are files which send information back to their parent website, and God help you if those cookies are from malicious hosts. Have you ever wondered how over time the emails you receive from that advertiser you didn't apply to his lottery seem to become more and more personalised to your tastes? That is the work of cookies, so be careful. Another good habit is to remember your passwords in your own head. Saving them in the browser is a poor habit, and any nasty worth his salt would have them from the browser (even Firefox) in the time it took me to type T-Y-P-E. Then there's the thrust of this article, what AV program should you use? About a month ago, The Law wrote an article about his experience with an AV program that I recommended to him

FROM THE BLOGS

a while back. In the following paragraphs I would mention my top five, and why I think they are that good. My test machine was a VMware emulation code named Texazz running Windows XP at 1.7GHz with 1GB of RAM... Read the rest at http://chxta.blogspot.com/2007/10/viruses-and spyware.html

ME SEF I TIRE/PORT HARCOURT: AN EXAGGERATED ACCOUNT/AUGUST 22, 2007 Don't ask me why I haven't updated my blog, or patched the sole of my shoe, or finished my project, or been to see my lovely grandparents. Just listen to those increasingly familiar sounds outside. The crickets are quiet, in their stead, the rat-tat-tat of automatic weapons, the worrisome whir of helicopters, the wailing of the innocent on his knees about to be executed. What is terror? Ask my tailor who used to live in Marine base; he is lucky to be alive. Homeless, bruised, no more shop, no Butterfly sewing machines, no angry customers screaming at him that the traditional wedding is tomorrow, and that the etubo must be sewn by tonight. He's lucky to be alive. Marine base is a ghost town. My aunt and her 'battalion' are now refugees in some relative's house. The militants have retreated into the everwelcoming creeks, the innocents have fled their modest homes, and even the fish in the area have gone off in search of less-troubled waters (I haven't had a half-decent plate of fresh fish pepper soup in weeks). The soldiers man the streets. Fierce, unyielding, foreign. They make us raise our hands as we pass. They whip women for sport, and savage boys for show. The streets are littered with bodies and bullet-casings. Blood flows into the stagnant gutters, trying, but failing to clot. What is peace? Over here on this side of the city, we are a bit more fortunate. We go to sleep hoping that those gunshots are loud rather than near. We pray the girl screaming in agony as the soldiers rape her is not a friend, or worse, a sister. The explosions rattle our buildings and our bodies. Bravery becomes a sentimental concept. We wake up, shrug off the rubble, cough dust, and get on. The grass is greener here, they say. What is sleep? The curfew adds to the chaos. The ashewos are cheaper and desperate. The brothels do brisk business between morning and evening. The soldiers have their pleasure on the house. At 6pm the okadas stop running, at 7pm the soldiers start shooting… go ahead, make their night. The night spots are ruined. We keep away from the windows and walk

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bending forward. We make love whenever we can, on the floor, and with the heated passion of people who know that tomorrow is a big-maybe. Le petit mort as the French say. The little death. Many petit morts before the big mort. What is death? The city that was once a garden is now full of wreaths. First were the inexplicable killings-armed gangs coming out in broad daylight and killing regular folk, you and I. For a week, in virtually every part of this metropolis, the guns rang out and we cowered in fear. What is courage? On Sunday the twelfth I was on an okada, zipping along, wind in my hair and all that. I got to a certain junction, and was told to get off, raise my hands, and walk all the way to the other side. I wasn't alone. We were legion. No one knew that soldiers had been drafted into our city. We were shocked and yet submissive. Vehicles also had to offload their human cargo. We all walked, hands raised, to the other side. In the middle of the road, three soldiers with body armour, and long guns fitted with bayonets were dancing to Fela's Unknown Soldier booming out of the speakers of an empty beer parlour. The irony, the frigging irony. So eerie, so messed up. Porter with hands raised, shaking his head and sighing. This is still Port Harcourt right? What is dignity? Read the rest at http://kpatakpata.blogspot.com/2007/08/port-harcourt-exaggeratedaccount.html

BETUMIBLOG/KELEWELE: MY FAVOURITE GHANANIAN SNACK/MAY 04, 2007 I'm in the midst of packing to spend a year in Brazil and Ghana but just caught sight of a bag of Nina International's "All Natural UDA Hwentia," sitting on my desk. It made me wish for some fresh kelewele, one of my all-time favourite snack foods from Ghana. Western cookbooks generally describe kelewele as something like "spicy fried plantain cubes," but that is like calling a sunset “beautiful”. All the recipes I've seen in Western cookbooks are anaemic versions of the best kelewele as it's prepared in Ghana. First of all, Western versions only call for salt, ginger, and dried red pepper, but in

FROM THE BLOGS

Ghana in addition to grinding fresh ginger and onion, they also commonly pound and add sekoni (aniseed), hwentia (a kind of long black stick I've yet to name botanically. Can anyone help me out?), and cloves. The plantain should be very ripe and sweet, and nicely coated with the mixture before it is deepfried. The plantain is generally cut on a diagonal rather than into a straight cube. Kelewele tastes superb accompanied with dry roasted peanuts. The sweet, spicy, and chewy plantain is a perfect counter to the mild crunchy/creamy flavor and texture of the peanuts. Both go well with an ice cold beer or drink like ginger beer or bissap. Nina International distributes many West African foods through its office in Maryland (PO Box 6566, Hyatsville, MD 20789). More information on suppliers is available at African Food Stores. Rest assured, Barbara Baeta and I will include an authentic recipe for gourmet kelewele in our upcoming book. From http://www.betumi.com/2007/05/kelewele-my-favorite-ghanaian-snack.html

reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (thanks Uncle Geoff!) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid and have now finished both. It's unforgivable to descend to banal platitudes when talking about great books and literature, but oh my God! They were amazing. Please drop whatever you're doing, scrape together your last pennies and go out and buy these books. The Reluctant Fundamentalist, I'm proud to announce has made it onto the Booker Longlist. I haven't read Gifted by Nikita Lalwani yet, which is the other Penguin title on the list so I'm not sure exactly which one I'll be rooting for, but it will definitely be one of those. I know The Grumpy Old Bookman isn't overly enamoured of these literary prizes, and neither was I for a while, but I really feel Hamid's book deserves some major recognition. Anyway, back to Kingsolver and Hamid. I think what I enjoyed most about their books is that they've done something different with first person narration. The prose was beautiful but not contrived, poetic without being ridiculous. Kingsolver narrated the story of the undoing of an American Baptist family in the Belgian Congo, by giving each of her characters their own unique voice with which to tell their story. The overall effect was of sitting round a table at some family's reconciliation meeting, getting their different perspectives on what they went through. Because each of them used their own lingo, and explained their thoughts and feelings, we got valuable insights into the character's motivations, which as I've mentioned before, is very important. Hamid's book appealed to me simply because I have a particular fondness for eavesdropping on stranger's conversations. I love sitting on the bus, in a restaurant, on a plane listening to what the people around me are talking about, how they're saying it and guessing at why they're saying it to whom they're saying it to. (You don't get to judge me, by the way!) So we see Changez, the protagonist sitting at dinner with someone, telling him about his life in America, how he came to fall out of love with the country, or possibly, how the country fell out of love with him. It felt like I was sitting at the table next to them, listening. The setting is Lahore, the two are eating dinner, but at the same time, it's New York, because the stories of his youth (which he's telling) transport us back there with confidence, mastery, and a little bit of nostalgia. It's a brilliant twist at the end, when the talk turns to secret plots and conspiracies that the unnamed dinner guest pops off Changez. Everything is implied of course, it's all very poetically done, but I felt awed and excited at the end at how it all worked together.

THE HALF INCH FOUNT/ON BOOKS THAT CHALLENGE YOU/AUGUST 12, 2007 I was in a bit of a reading rut, recently. You know when that happens, it's like you can't concentrate, you really want to read but you're intensely bored etc. So anyway, I started

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Another theme that ran through both books, was the concept of 'otherness' in societies; what constitutes it, what perpetuates it, whether it can be overcome, and if so, how. The Price family kids in The Poisonwood Bible were set apart from their peers at school because they were labelled the preacher's kids. Read the rest at http://thehalfinchfount.blogspot.com/2007/08/on-books-thatchallenge-you.html

Reviews FILM BAMAKO

By MOLARA WOOD

t a Paris summit in 2005, Paul Wolfowitz — proponent of the Iraq war and now ousted World Bank chief — said, “It is a sad fact that malaria kills an African child every 30 seconds despite the existence of methods to both prevent a n d c u r e t h e d i s e a s e .” I n Abderrahmane Sissako's new film, Wolfowitz is ridiculed for shedding “crocodile tears.” The film is Bamako, a surreal mix of fact and fiction in which the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) stand trial for destroying African societies. Only twenty percent of the players are actors; the judge, lawyers and witnesses are real. And former Malian Minister of Culture, Aminata Traore, testifies to the ruinous effects of Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) on Malian economy. But the film insists, "We are all responsible." A movie-within-themovie, “Death in Timbuktu”, underlines the point. Africans are 48

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players and spectators in the drama of their own lives, as locals watch the spoof Western on television. The setting is mud architectural Africa, and dark-skinned cowboys are on a shooting spree. Starring Danny Glover (who co-produced Bamako), the cinematic interlude provides comic relief as well as commentary about African leaders and elites who collude with the West to exploit their own people. Still, African corruption pales in the face of charges levelled at Western financial institutions. “Even in our imaginations, we are raped,” one witness laments. “Debt has brought Africa to her knees,” and the continent has been placed in “a vicious circle, an absurd circle.” A young man tells a harrowing tale of desperation and death in the desert. An abortive attempt to cross the Sahara into Europe and only ten in the group of thirty survive. One fatality, a young Ghanaian woman disguised as a boy for the journey, lies dying in the sand. Oumou Sangare's song, 'Saa Magni', plays to the tragic moment. Born in Mauritania and raised in

Mali, Sissako shot the trial on five cameras over seven days in the same courtyard where he grew up. Families negotiate their daily lives in the communal space, flowing seamlessly through trial scenes. Water is drawn from a well; cotton weaved; fabrics dyed; and Mr Rappaport (defending the West) haggles over the price of contraband Gucci sunglasses during a court break. There is a wedding, during which a trilling singer serenades the judge till he hands over some cash. And a marriage breaks down. Melé, a singer, is leaving for Dakar — abandoning her husband, Chaka, and young daughter. Melé contests the courtyard space with her femininity, summoning a young man to tie her backstraps in full view of the court. Like thousands of Malian men affected by the devastation of the railways, Chaka is unemployed. He dreams of guarding the Israeli embassy, when eventually one opens in Mali. Cameraman Falaï films weddings and photographs dead bodies for the police. He prefers the dead who cannot speak because, as he tells Chaka, “they're truer." The conversation has a profound effect on the disillusioned Chaka whose voice is accidentally wiped off a tape. Asked to be re-recorded, he declines, telling the court recorder, “No one will listen. Don't waste your time.” Like Ousmane Sembène, Sissako studied film in Moscow. Sembène's last feature, Moolaadé (2004), is an 'issue' movie in which a courtyard heroine takes a stand against female genital mutilation (FGM). Bamako is similar in its treatment of one politically-charged subject matter, albeit with wider global implications, than FGM. Perhaps, it is in the portrayal of women that Bamako most closely echoes Moolaadé. Women are pivotal to nearly every Bamako scene. Djénéba Koné, playing Chaka's sister and keen trial watcher, gives Melé (Aïssa Maïga) a run for her money in the beauty stakes. Actress Hélène Diarra, who played the senior wife in Moolaadé, also presides over the courtyard in Bamako as Saramba, leader of the tieand-dye women. In one scene, she tonguelashes an African lawyer for defending the West.

Reviews The trial is relayed over loudspeakers around the courtyard, but many seem disinterested, going about their lives in vignettes of movement and stillness. But when Rappaport gives his closing arguments, irritated listeners suddenly want the loudspeakers off, complaining that the “trial is getting boring.” They are not so apathetical after all. When loudspeakers fall silent in another scene, there is confusion. The “silent witness” is an unemployed teacher whose burden is too heavy for words. Bamako's emotional highpoint comes in a chant by a real-life balafon player. The old man comes to the stand in the beginning, but is told to wait his turn. “My words will not remain within me,” he vows. His turn comes eventually, and it is a cry of pain that requires no translation. In Hollywood films like The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond and The Last King of Scotland (which shows Ugandan dictator Idi Amin through the eyes of a Scottish doctor), Africa is still a Conradian “metaphysical landscape” in which the European “discovers” himself. Bamako does the opposite, privileging Africa's voice. After Sissako's earlier films — Life on Earth (1998) and Waiting for Happiness (2002) — the director realised he could no longer make “soft” political movies. Filmed in French and Bambara with English subtitles, Bamako is necessary viewing. One of Africa's representatives is a French prosecutor who gives an impassioned closing speech. This is not a case of “them and us”, the film suggests. Whether you are African or European, you can feel, as a human being. The judge is asked to pass a sentence of community service for all mankind, for eternity. This would be the only humane option — “after all, we cannot throw Wolfowitz in the Niger.” Bamako is on general release.

LANRE

Where there is no shame, there is no honour. Congo 49

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Reviews

WhatGoogleHasJoinedTogether By Toye Gbade

nline wanderers like myself, tossed to and fro by the turbulent waves of search engines and sometimes lost in the entangling web of the internet, are always jubilant when they run into the rare occurrence of a serviceable, homegrown website. Recently, out of a craving for excitement, I ‘googled’ the name of the famous Nigerian musician Fatai Rolling Dollar. I did this not believing that I would get what I wanted, which was a site where I could listen to his music online. Amongst the many websites brought up by the search was a certain onlinenigeria.com. On following the link, my dream, not only of finding Fatai Rolling Dollar's music but that of other Nigerian greats like Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, Bongus Ikwue, Oliver De Coque, Sir Victor Uwaifo, Onyeka Onwenu, Bobby Benson, Sir Victor Olaiya and many more, was fulfilled. Ever since that day, whenever I go online the site has become a daily stop. It is common knowledge that since the creation of the internet the world has become a global village. Yet, more than ten years down the line of this contribution to the information age, many African countries are still lacking satisfactory representation of their culture, music and art — their voice — online. This situation fails to fulfill a need that is begging for attention, the need of Africans on sojourn in foreign lands to find a slice of home on the internet. Like a five-star hotel in the middle of the Sahara, onlinenigeria.com, since its five years of inception, has been flying the flag of hope and comfort to all African travellers lost in the deserts of cyberspace. Its kitchens have provided them with mouth-watering, homemade cuisine. It has served ‘SchoolMates’ to old school mates wanting to know where their long lost friends are; ‘SoulMates’ to people looking for a place to meet each other online, and a ‘Chat’ function for those online visitors who are just seeking someone to talk with. It has made ‘News’ from Nigeria and Africa available online, while at the same time soothing nerves with familiar, classic African music. Also on the menu daily is the Photo Gallery, Blog and Jokes page, amongst others. On the flip side, onlinenigeria.com has, in an attempt to incorporate all of the above-listed

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services, almost lost the ability to deliver the bountiful pleasures of its content to the first-time visitor quickly enough. Though the site opens fast with good internet connection, its design is not clean, and the average user might not find their way around. The use of technology on the site is not imaginative, suggesting a low budget: a lot of times the functionalities packed into the site just break down without prior notice. Several sections of the site also have errors and lack frequent updates, hinting to the fact that the team of reviewers and editors are probably overworked. On the whole however, I think the administrators of onlinenigeria.com have made a laudable attempt at tackling a begging need, and the site may soon become a song on the lips of every Nigerian (indeed African) home and abroad.

UNFINISHED MATTER nialists: Black Coolo e the root itf hthN igeria trouble w (Part 1) ring Chinweizu answe aul Odili... questions from P

ou have expressed the view that the process of liberation of Nigeria from colonial rule was not far-reaching enough. May we know why you think this is so? I do so, simply to emphasize that the rhetoric claimed far much more than was actually achieved. In 1960, Nigerian leaders claimed they had achieved independence — the independence of Nigeria from Britain. But that was not true! They hadn't. Nigeria had merely become a Bantustan — a black “homeland” ruled by black colonialists, and still exploited for imperialism. Far from becoming independent, Nigeria was, and is still, till today, held captive within the economic and cultural structures of the British Empire, which the British politely and craftily renamed “The Commonwealth”. If they had understood what independence is, those leaders would have realized that what they won in 1960, by a negotiated transfer of administration, was, at most, only the first important political battle on the hard road to independence. Far from the struggle being over, the political stage had only just been set for it to seriously begin. But unfortunately, their conception of their project was terribly limited. As the Nigerian independence movement did not put a premium on political education, they failed to study the imperialist enemy well, and they produced no analysis or theory of anti-colonial struggle to illuminate their way. Consequently, they had not seen the need to struggle for the total liquidation of colonialism. The leaders were aiming only to replace the white colonialists. Of course, the Sardauna

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had a slightly bigger agenda. He was concerned also with recovering his imperial inheritance, the Sokoto Empire. For him and his feudal Fulani cohorts, it was also a struggle to recover their pre-colonial Sokoto Empire and then resume its expansion until, as they said, they “dipped the Koran in the sea.” And by 1970, at the end of the Nigerian civil war, they had achieved that. And they promptly settled down to cream off and feed fat on the oil bonanza of their enlarged Sokoto Empire which wore the disguise of Nigeria. The others simply wanted to replace the white colonialists so as to enjoy the European conquerors' way of life. If Zik and Awo had any deeper notion of what their independence struggle should achieve, I am yet to discover where they expressed it. Lacking an ideology, and not having any intellectual organ to do detailed forward thinking for them, they had no conception of the stages the struggle needed to go through. And at what they called “independence”, a liberation movement did not step into office to continue with what remained of the struggle. If they had conceived of liberation in a correct and thoroughgoing manner — as requiring the total liquidation of colonialism — they might have produced a clear road map to liberation and known what to do immediately after getting into office. Unlike them, Amilcar Cabral, in Guinea Bissau, insisted that “the national liberation struggle is a revolution, and that it is not over at the moment when the flag is hoisted and the national anthem is played,” and that “so long as imperialism is in existence, an independent African state must be a liberation movement in power, or it will not be independent.” Liberation or, to use the Nigerian terminology, Independence, is not simply a matter of getting autonomy for determining your policies within the existing local and international structures. Their error illustrates what Cabral called “the ideological deficiency of the national liberation movements” in Black Africa. Lacking a detailed knowledge of their own reality, and blind to what Cabral called the “presuppositions and objectives of national liberation in relation to social structure”, the Nigerian independence movement not only failed, but also failed to see that they had failed, thus proving Cabral correct, not only about revolution but also about liberation/independence, when he said that “if it is true that a

Unfinished Matter

revolution can fail, even though it be nurtured on perfectly conceived theories, nobody has yet successfully practised Revolution without a revolutionary theory.” If you set out from Lagos to Kaduna, but have no idea where Kaduna is or what it looks like or how far it is, you can leave Iddo and get to Ikeja and think you have finished your journey. The freedom movement in Nigeria had a superficial conception of the colonialism they were struggling against, and even less knowledge of the global imperialism of which the colonialism they attacked was just the local agency. They therefore had no realistic notion of what liberation would require. I think that their failure to study and understand the scope of their project — a failure caused by the intellectual poverty, indeed intellectual barrenness, of the movement — was the fundamental reason why their struggle did not go far enough. And, by the way, this happened not only in Nigeria. In most Black African countries, the leadership of the so-called liberation/independence movements had made no detailed study of what they ought to be struggling for and how. As in Nigeria, their thinking was simply that the White man was enjoying “life more abundant”, and excluded them by the colour bar, and they wanted to join in by taking over the structures in which the white man was enjoying. They simply wanted the colour bar removed. They wanted to enjoy the white man's jobs and pay; they wanted to go to the white man's clubs, and to live where and how the white man lived. For those in South Africa, where they faced a white settler community, part of their resented target was the social apartheid structure — they could not move about without carrying passes; they could not vote; they could not live wherever they liked; they could not legally socialize with, mate with or marry whites. By the time of the ANC's Freedom Charter in 1955, they had effectively narrowed down their aims to gaining the same rights and freedoms that whites enjoyed in the Apartheid state, and had abandoned the earlier ANC aims of recovering their expropriated lands, restoring sovereignty to the eclipsed black African kingdoms, and regenerating the shattered cultures of the black African race. Such an under-conceptualisation of their struggle has proved a disaster for their peoples after their struggles “succeeded” and they came into office. They did not go into office to dig out colonialism root and branch; or to build their people's power; or to protect their people from imperialism; or to recover the sovereignty their people lost under colonialism. In Nigeria, as elsewhere, having taken over the political administration created by the white colonialists, their aims were limited to taking over the white residential areas — Ikoyi, Victoria Island and the GRAs — and the senior service jobs, complete with “home leave” and homes in Britain! Such was their conception of independence. Not having studied the

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nature of colonialism deeply enough, they had only a superficial understanding of what had happened to their people and did not see that they should be struggling for anything deeper and greater. Accordingly, whenever they managed, often at great cost, to politically or militarily defeat their white colonisers, these Black African movements did not know what they should do next with their victory. And this was true of all the struggles, from Haiti in 1804 to South Africa in 1994. And because of their failure to continue the struggle to its correct conclusion, what black Africans have been calling “independence” for the last 50 years, has actually been black comprador colonialism. On each country's “independence day”, it simply moved from being ruled and exploited for imperialism by white expatriate colonialists to being ruled and exploited for imperialism by black comprador colonialists. There had simply been a changing of the colour of the staff, from white to black, in the same imperialist prison. Consequently, white supremacy remains entrenched everywhere, obscured by black buffer, front office governments. For independence to be attained the struggle needs to be resumed to overthrow the black colonialists — the black comprador managers of what Nkrumah himself called neo-colonialism. Let me emphasize that to the champions of the independence struggle (from Nkrumah and Zik to Mandela) all honour is due for what they achieved. But, in fairness, we should not honour them for what they didn't achieve; and certainly not for what they imagined they'd achieved but had not. They took us part of the way, and for that they should be honoured. But the journey is uncompleted, and, if we are to complete it, we need to understand just how much of the journey is still ahead. And to understand that, we need a honest, thorough and unsentimental assessment of what they achieved, and of how far we have come short of the destination. The point of this exercise, of my observations, is to find out what was done, what was left undone and why, so the very important job they set out to do can be completed.

A Festival of African Film

An Interview with Mahen Bonetti By Sean Jacobs

n the early 1990s when Mahen Bonetti, the director of the prestigious New York African Film Festival, first approached a number of cultural establishments in New York City about hosting a festival devoted to African films, the response was cool. She persisted and in 1993 the New York African Film Festival was born at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Since then Mahen, working from a small office in Manhattan, has built the festival into a cultural institution of great reckoning in New York City. Among others, she introduced mainstream American audiences to filmmakers as diverse as Abderrahmane Sissako, Tunde Kelani, and more recently the young South Africans, Khalo Matabane and Dumisani Phakathi. Mahen remains as optimistic about African filmmakers' ability to tell stories as when she first mounted the film festival. As she told Sean Jacobs in this interview, “African cinema has a wide future ahead of itself, especially with the advancement of technology, so I think that there are so many different roads African cinema can and should take, and all are equally important, so long as they are putting the voices of Africans first.”

SJ: How did you begin a career producing and directing the New York African Film Festival, that is now probably the oldest and most respected African film festival in New York City, if not the US? Can you also tell us something about your background and where your love for film comes from? MB: Well, I came to African cinema somewhat out of desperation. Where I am from, Sierra Leone, and especially, the period that I am from in Sierra Leone's history — I was privileged to experience first hand our renunciation of colonialism — when there is something wrong with the landscape of Africa, you say something! Here, in the States, at the end of the 1980s, I felt the African voice in the Diaspora had become mute. I am not sure what it was, but it seemed like none of us were able to speak intelligently about our home. It was like, “Oh, another tragedy at home; poor Africa,” as we poured another martini. I began to feel really desperate. Children were embarrassed to be Africans, adults couldn't or wouldn't talk about Africa, and the rest of the world merely looked on in pity or in horror. So, you know, out of all this, African Film Festival. Inc. (AFF) was born. As for me, I am an African, who is also a New Yorker, and my love for films is really about my love for beauty in motion — I love to see my fellow Africans on the screen and I

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INTERVIEW I Sean Jacobs

love to see the landscapes from our old, and our new, homes. SJ: It is clear that gaining a widespread following for African films in the US (both in terms of encouraging audiences to see these films, as well as getting the media to engage with it) is a difficult process. What are the main problems or challenges you face? MB: One of the objectives of AFF is to counter the distorted images of Africa and African culture that have remained dominant in the US and international media since the 1950s. With the advent of the colonial and missionary superstructures, African images were often produced to portray negative depictions of Africans as child-like, uneducated and uncivilized. AFF, on the other hand, has been committed to promoting more realistic depictions of African culture and people by presenting images made by Africans themselves, or made in close collaboration with Africans, and thus giving a voice and a venue to the misrepresented. Of course, this is an incredibly fortuitous task in itself, being both a means to an end. While places like New York City act as a virtual playground for the celebration of diverse cultures, the funding needed to get African films out in the public is a constant challenge, and some might say, an advantage, particularly since the change in the political atmosphere brought about by the advent of 9–11. Conversely, and ironically, due to the large amount of cultural offerings that New York City has to offer, competition is far higher for individuals seeking funding for programs such as those produced by AFF, than say, in a place like the midwest, where rare and niche programs have higher funding opportunities. Beyond the funding obstacles are the additional technical aspects of getting foreign films exposed in the US. Some African films are not fortunate enough to have a distribution outlet to begin with. Of those films that do have distributors, many times the rights are exclusive to certain regions of the world, such as the Africa or Europe. Furthermore, many great African films can be viewed by the public in English — subtitled 35mm print. However, for us to even arrive at this point (where English-speaking audiences are seeing the print), it would be helpful if an English-subtitled screener VHS or DVD copy was available for review by critics and journalists in the US — or any other English-speaking countries, so that the films can be vetted by the public and have the chance to make it into the theaters. For several years, 56

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A Festival of African Film

it was impossible to have an English-subtitled screener made available — although this is changing with the new generation of cineastes — and this made the process of selling African films that much more challenging! How can the English-speaking media review a film if they can't understand it? One can certainly not assume that they will make the effort to read transcribed dialogues. Other times, filmmakers or distributors assume that AFF is financially supported by larger institutions such as the ones that we partner with, which is absolutely not the case. This can create uncomfortable negotiations for increases in rental fees, for example, that AFF is expected to provide. The reality is that AFF is a nonprofit organization with limited access to funding, and much of the wonderful work we do is supported not by dollars, but by dedication and passion to our mission. SJ: What are some of the strategies you employ to overcome these challenges? MB: Again, as part of our goal, AFF is continually seeking other avenues to enhance distribution opportunities for African films especially through our yearround programming. This may come in the form of inviting filmmakers whenever possible to AFF programs, and creating networking opportunities for them with their US counterparts and other contacts in the film industry, in the hopes that mutual and cross-cultural collaborations will manifest. For example, with the introduction of his films to US audiences in New York, Nigerian filmmaker, Tunde Kelani has gone on to receive invitations to festivals and organizations in Toronto, Europe and elsewhere, and he has played a large part in the international recognition of the Nigerian film industry. Similarly, AFF was the first to promote the works of Abderrahmane Sissako, who, with the success of his most recent film Bamako, is presently one of the filmmakers in high demand, not to mention African filmmakers around the world, including sitting on the jury at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. In this way AFF acts as a facilitator, or liaison, for developing further distribution opportunities for African filmmakers. Also, in our 17 years of existence, AFF has established close ties with many filmmakers and distributors on the continent and in the Diaspora, who have come to trust AFF's dedication, passion and mission. Once filmmakers and distributors fully understand what we are trying to do — with our

INTERVIEW I Sean Jacobs

shoestring budgeta heightened sense of collaboration usually results in finding one way or another to get the films the wider and rightful exposure they deserve. SJ: Some film festivals trawl the festival circuit in the US and take films from there. Where do you get your films from? MB: As I have mentioned, due to the close relationships that AFF has developed with the spectrum of seasoned and emerging filmmakers on the Continent and the Diaspora, we are always hearing of and asking about new projects. We continually keep our ears to the ground, and utilize contacts such as other film festivals, curators, artists and industry professionals to stay on top of new and upcoming releases. In addition, I work closely with organizers of other African film festivals overseas, and try to attend some of the major ones — FESPACO in Burkina Faso or Sithengi in South Africa — whenever possible. Also, because of the quality programming and hospitality that we have become known for, we are approached by filmmakers and distributors as well, so soliciting films is usually a secondary option for us. Finally, AFF is proud to host an impressive private library of African Films, with over 400 titles on VHS and DVD. This library is always another good resource for us when considering classic and contemporary films for programming. SJ: What do you make of the recent and renewed appetite for Africa, in general, even as a backdrop, in Hollywood films? I mean films such as Constant Gardener, Blood Diamonds, The Last King of Scotland, In My Country, Red Dust and Catch a Fire? Are they all the same, or should we distinguish between them? MB: In some ways, it is exciting to see Africa get some recognition on the Hollywood landscape. In other ways, it is important to be critical of the ways in which Africa is depicted and the stories that are told. We must ask, from whose perspectives are these stories being told, and what exactly are these stories themselves saying about the state of Africa today, and her relationship within the international arena? I'm wary of films that do exactly what you mention – use Africa as a “backdrop,” as if the continent were simply a place where western stories happen. In films such as The Last King of Scotland, while the stories remain very specific to the history of the African countries, they are usually contextualized through the viewpoint of a westerner. While I understand the need to structure a story to make it accessible to its intended audience, I am very much looking forward to the day when Hollywood will be brave enough to depict an African story from the viewpoint of the African. This, of course, is a simplification of the issue, and perhaps not one to be expected from the apparatus such as that of Hollywood. In any case, I can always dream. With the current trend in pop-culture and mass media where celebrities like Bono take on righteous causes in

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A Festival of African Film

Africa, and others adopt African babies, I would hope that people will go beyond the surface to explore the real issues underlying these recent phenomena of celebrity endorsement of Africa. Similarly, it is also nice when those who endorse Hollywood and mainstream media films that have to do with Africa — Blood Diamond — stake the extra step to educate themselves about the issues presented to them through the world of entertainment. It seems only logical to me to do so, and what I would think any conscious global citizen would seek to do. SJ: We now have over 30 film festivals dedicated to films from and about Africa and its Diaspora in the US. Where do we go after film festivals: Internet distribution or the Nollywood model? Or is it a case of different priorities? MB: I think it is definitely a case of different priorities. African cinema is not homogenous, not monolithic, and any such overarching African film industry should reflect that. My dream is that African cinema can one day become streamlined into the general film canon, rather than always being in the “niche market segment”. This would mean greater distribution and accessibility of African films wherever one would look for films. This means just as wide a selection of African titles on Netflix, or some other Internet venue, as other “foreign titles” like Chinese and Iranian cinema, Africa is a continent with 54 countries after all. The Nollywood model works well, but is not the only model to be used. So, it would be great if all the 30 festivals could network with each other and serve diverse functions for the overall benefit of the industry. In addition, I believe that African cinema has a wide future ahead of itself, especially with the advancement of technology, so I think that there are so many different roads African cinema can and should take, and all are equally important, so long as they are putting the voices of Africans first. SJ: Which African filmmakers are, for you, the Sembene, Mambety, Safi Faye, Kwaw Ansah or Flora Gomes of this generation? MB: Wow! That's a tough one, it's like asking, “Which of your babies do you love the most?” Honestly, I am proud of all of emerging filmmakers that I have become familiar with. I don't want to sound like I am favoring anyone, but I am always really excited about the emerging generation of filmmakers such as Khalo Matabane and Dumisani Phakathi from South Africa; Osvalde Lewat-Hallade from Cameroun; Daniel Workou from Ethiopia; Isabelle Boni-Calverie from Ivory Coast; Seke Somolu from Nigeria and Dyana Gaye and Alain Gomis from Senegal — the list goes on and on. Not only are these young filmmakers doing really amazing things, but they are also bringing their unique perspectives and global sensibilities that come with their generation of Africans who live both on the Continent and throughout the Diaspora. They are definitely names to look out for, if you haven't heard about them already.

When suffering knocks at your door and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. Chinua Achebe

LANRE

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Exhibit 12

Enimien Etomi