Imagine Africa Read online

  COPYRIGHT © 2014, ISLAND POSITION

  FIRST EDITION

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-914671-19-0

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-914671-18-3

  “Poets, to your quills, Africa is taking off” by Georges Lory – copyright © 2014, Georges Lory, English language copyright © 2014, Jocelyn Spaar. “Dialect of Untamed Hurricanes” by Frankétienne is an excerpt of Mûr à crever, Ana Editions, 2004. copyright © 2004, Frankétienne, English language copyright © 2014, Kaiama L. Glover. “Unwittingly,” “Lies,” and “Warning” by Akinwumi Isola – copyright Akinwumi Isola © 2014, English language copyright © 2014, Akinloye Ojo. “Who’s in Charge Here” by Paulina Chiziane – copyright © 2014, Paulina Chiziane, English language copyright © 2014, David Brookshaw. “Quem manda aqui” – in: As Andorinhas, 2008. “Fear” (“La Peur”) first appeared in L’Iguifou: Nouvelles rwandaises, Paris: Gallimard, 2010, English translation copyright © 2014, Melanie Mauthner. Cedric Nunn photographs and ‘Madhlawu’ copyright © 1999, Cedric Nunn. “Across the Fields,” “Galway,” and “Aran Island” first appeared in Across the Fields, Imprenta de los Trópicos & In de Bonnefant, 2003. copyright © 2003, Hans van de Waarsenburg, English language copyright © 2003, Peter Boreas. Mia Couto’s “The Frontier of Culture” is one of a selection of Mia Couto’s essays and autobiographical writings translated by David Brookshaw to be published by Biblioasis in 2015, English language copyright © 2014, David Brookshaw. “Le cercle des Arabes disparus … et retrouvés” copyright © 2013, Abdellatif Laâbi. “The Community of Arabs Lost – and Found,” English language copyright © 2014, Donald Nicholson-Smith. “bride in the water with swallows,” “hangmoon brightly lost,” “the favour,” “this is the way the song was sung,” “dirge for a revolution,” “small etymology lesson” by Breyten Breytenbach – copyright © 2014, Breyten Breytenbach, French language copyright © 2014 Georges Lory. “Elle va nue la liberté” and “Les enfants de Syrie” first appeared in Elle va nue la liberté, Éditions Bruno Doucey, 2013, French language copyright © 2013, Éditions Bruno Doucey. “Imagining Africa,” “Ko Un at Kersefontein,” “Seamus Heaney in Italy,” “Opening Up,” “Autumn in the Casentino,” and “The Pieces” by Bill Dodd – copyright © 2014, Bill Dodd. “Prelude,” “Sadness,” and “Majung Village” copyright © 2006, the Regents of the University of California. “Aimé Césaire” by Ernest Pépin first appeared in Dit de la roche gravée, Mémoire d’encrier, 2008, English language copyright © 2014, Christopher Winks. “Do you think there’s something back there in the boot,” “Butterflies” by Louis Esterhuizen – Afrikaans copyright © 2013, Louis Esterhuizen, English language copyright © 2013, Charl JF Cilliers. “Treadmill Love” by Billy Kahora copyright © 2012, Billy Kahora. “Letter from Bia d’Ideal” first published in Corsino Fortes Poems (Enitharman/Poetry Translation Centre, London, 2008) “The Prostitute,” “I Pass Through the Days,” and “Letter from Bia d’Ideal,” English language copyright © 2014, Daniel Hahn and Sean O’Brien; Portuguese copyright © 1986, Corsino Fortes. “An Edifying Story” by João Melo – copyright © 2013, João Melo, English language copyright © 2014, David Brookshaw. “Prelude,” “Sadness,” and “Majung Village” © 1986, Ko Un. “The Litigant,” “From the Ashes of a Pigeon,” “Anthem of the Nation,” and “Atmospheric Spirits” by Ali Jimale Ahmed – copyright © 2014, Ali Jimale Ahmed. Excerpt from “Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act” © 1974, Athol Fugard. “Apologia (Nkomati)” by Wole Soyinka copyright © 1989, Wole Soyinka.

  Island Position is grateful for the generous support of the Eva Tas Foundation.

  Cover art: Innocent Nkurunziza – copyright © 2014, Innocent Nkurunziza.

  TRADE PAPERBACK DESIGN BY POLLEN

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  GEORGES LORY

  Introduction, Poets, to your quills, Africa is taking off

  Translated from the French by JOCELYN SPAAR

  FRANKÉTIENNE

  The Dialect of Untamed Hurricanes

  Translated from the French by KAIAMA L. GLOVER

  AKINWUMI ISOLA

  Unwittingly Lies Warning

  Translated from the Yoruba by AKINLOYE OJO

  PAULINA CHIZIANE

  Who’s In Charge Here?

  Translated from the Portuguese by DAVID BROOKSHAW

  AHMAD FOUAD NEGM

  Alexandria, Your Sea is Full of Wonders The Eyes of Words

  Translated from the Arabic by CATHERINE COBHAM and MARILYN BOOTH

  FRANCIS BEBEY

  The Ifé Mask

  Translated from the French by CHRISTOPHER WINKS

  MIA COUTO

  The Frontier of Culture

  Translated from the Portuguese by DAVID BROOKSHAW

  MIRAM AL-MASRI

  from Elle va nue la liberté

  Translated from the French by JILL SCHOOLMAN

  SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA

  Fear

  Translated from the French by MELANIE MAUTHNER

  BREYTEN BREYTENBACH

  bride in the water with swallows hangmoon brightly lost the favour ‘this is the way the song was sung’ dirge for a revolution small etymology lesson

  Translated from the Afrikaans by Georges Lory (French) and Breyten Breytenbach (English)

  CEDRIC NUNN

  Madhlawu (photographs and essay)

  ABDELLATIF LABI

  The Community of Arabs Lost – and Found

  Translated from the French by DONALD NICHOLSON-SMITH

  ERNEST PÉPIN

  Aimé Césaire

  Translated from the French by CHRISTOPHER WINKS

  AIMÉ CÉSAIRE

  from Cahier d’un retour au pays natal

  Translated from the French by JOHN BERGER and ANNA BOSTOCK

  LOUIS ESTERHUIZEN

  Do you think there’s something back there in the boot Butterflies

  Translated from the Afrikaans by CHARL JF CILLIERS

  BILLY KAHORA

  Treadmill Love

  CORSINO FORTES

  The Prostitute I Pass Through the Days Letter from Bia d’Ideal

  Translated from the Portuguese by DANIEL HAHN and SEAN O’BRIEN

  JILL SCHOOLMAN

  Empty Boat

  JOÃO MELO

  An Edifying Story

  Translated from the Portuguese by DAVID BROOKSHAW

  ALI JIMALE AHMED

  The Litigant From the Ashes of a Pigeon Anthem of the Nation Atmospheric Spirits

  HANS VAN DE WAARSENBURG

  Across the Fields Galway Aran Islands

  Translated from the Dutch by PETER BOREAS

  BILL DODD

  Imagining Africa Ko Un at Kersefontein Seamus Heaney in Italy Opening Up Autumn in the Casentino The Pieces

  KO UN

  Prelude Sadness Majung Village

  Translated from the Korean by RICHARD SILBER and CLARE YOU

  BIRAGO DIOP

  The Breath of the Ancestors A Young Black Child’s Prayer

  Translated from the French by JOCELYN SPAAR

  ALBERT COSSERY

  The Beggars Misery Night

  Translated from the French by JOCELYN SPAAR

  ATHOL FUGARD

  from Statements After an Arrest Under the Immorality Act

  WOLE SOYINKA

  Apologia (Nkomati)

  Art Credits

  “More than anything, one is struck by the light.”

  RYSZARD KAPUŚCIŃSKI

  “I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madme
n.”

  J.G. BALLARD

  GEORGES LORY

  Translated from the French by JOCELYN SPAAR

  Poets, to your quills, Africa is taking off

  GEORGES LORY worked in Africa as a journalist for Jeune Afrique, as a diplomat, as Head of International Affairs for Radio France Internationale and as Delegate General of the Alliance Française in Southern Africa. He has written several books on Africa and has translated many South African authors – including Breyten Breytenbach, John Matshikisa, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, Antjie Krog and Lebo Mashile – into French.

  JOCELYN SPAAR is a translator, artist, and poet. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review Daily, Bridge Journal, Stonecutter, Storychord, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Paper Nautilus. Spaar also once won a hamburger-eating contest, beating out four portly men in an epic battle.

  WE ARE ALL Africans. We were born here on the continent less than two hundred thousand years ago. Do you remember our races in the savanna, our neverending conversations around the fire, the fabulous stories we told? We evoked heroic hunts, distant gods, ancestors who kept their eyes on us. The stars would wink at us while we spoke of love and fine backsides. Yes, we would chat a lot, all the while picking berries, sharpening our weapons, weaving our baskets, digging mines, and erecting our stone monuments. Our artists have carved the intense moments of our existences in rock.

  Ages ago some of us left the continent to go plant our cabbages in Europe, our rice in Asia, our corn in America. Over the centuries, we have never stopped migrating from Africa, always risking our lives: out of the need to find new spaces, under the whip of the slave drivers, or impelled by our days of misery. We never lost speech – it is vaulting forward.

  What genetic mutation made the first appearance of Homo sapiens in Africa possible? I asked an Indian biologist in Johannesburg during a DNA test. She told me about the hypothesis of the language gene. Eve began to talk, her sons responded to her. Incidentally, I learned that my mother’s haplogroup had migrated from Africa toward the Middle East, and then, 10,000 years ago, to Bulgaria and finally Germany. The researcher Brian Sykes gave female names to Eve’s seven daughters, the groups that make up the origin of Europe. I’m waiting for a genealogist-poet to beautifully baptize the fifteen haplogroups of Africa. This fascinating research also shows that people might constitute part of the same group and not look anything at all like each other. In this way Mandela learned that he had distant Khoisan roots, which deeply interested him.

  Africa is the birthplace of language, and thus, of poetry. Our ancestors developed sophisticated languages, with numerous sounds. As Homo sapiens moved away from Africa, the music of human languages simplified. According to a census there are 141 phonemes in the !xu language, spoken by a group of Khoisans in Southern Africa, aboriginal hunters of the Kalahari who have the defining feature of using clicks (up to 17 in certain languages), three of which are present in Xhosa and Zulu, both Bantu languages. In the arc that runs from Dakar to Cape Town, most of the languages contain more phonemes than the global average. English has 44 phonemes, Portuguese has almost as many, while French has 36. They drop to 32 phonemes in Mandarin, 13 in Hawaiian.

  A language reflects a system of thought. It offers us a structure for understanding the outside world and personal emotions. Rich in 2,000 languages, Africa is well equipped to face contemporary challenges. 522 languages exist in Nigeria, 230 in Cameroon and 221 in the Democratic Republic of Congo. South Africa has unabashedly established eleven official languages. “This plurality is a blessing,” rightly holds the philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, which does not exempt one from seeking the continent’s unity. Africans, the great majority of whom are polyglots, have access to a number of modes of thought. It is common to find individuals who have mastered half a dozen languages, an impressive feat along the central belt between Conakry and Djibouti, where they are dealing with languages of vastly different roots. Via English, French or Portuguese, Africans have access to worlds of European, North American, Brazilian, and Australian thought … Arabic offers them an opening to the Middle East and the Gulf. Soon there will be millions speaking Mandarin. China, Africa’s main commercial partner, is setting up its Confucius Institutes all over the map.

  No matter what our facility with languages of international communication might be, we all have a language of the heart – one we use to caress our intimate thoughts, one that permits us to express the nuances of our emotions: the language of our dreams, of our poems. We should be proud of this, cherish it, pass it on. We should pay tribute to the recent strides American universities have made in inviting African philosophers to transcribe their reflections in their mother tongues before translating them into English. The more finely they elaborate their thoughts, the better their philosophies will reverberate in the world.

  Thus we will leave behind the clichés and categories of past centuries. Not long ago, Francis Bebey implored:

  Do not place me in the absurd compartments

  Of the science of another world.

  While African musicians are captivating the planet, in tomorrow’s world, thousands of African poets will make their voices heard. Feet planted in earth, sleeves rolled up, they will proclaim their aspirations loud and clear. Their visions of the world as it faces its future will be accessible to all of us.

  With the first wave of globalization, which can be traced back to the voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, Africa welcomed silent migrants: plants. In Mozambique, for example, Mia Couto loves to surprise his students by asking them the origin of the most popular dishes, and then explaining to them: the coconut comes from Indonesia and the cassava root from Latin America. The mango and the guava are so well acclimated that many assume they are African. It is interesting to note that Pretoria made the jacaranda its “fetish tree,” even though a gardener brought it from Rio de Janeiro in 1888. This tree is a great consumer of water, but city-dwellers were wildly opposed to the suggestion that it be replaced by an indigenous, sober plant. Incidentally, along with its neighbour Johannesburg, Pretoria has established a world record: this immense urban agglomeration also hosts the the largest forest planted by man.

  When we see Johannesburg’s towers, Soweto’s matchboxes lined up infinitely to the south and the undulating green to the north, it’s hard to imagine that the economic capital of Africa didn’t exist until 1884. It was only dry savanna with a few scattered bushes, glacial on winter nights. On a continent where the topography teaches us an ancient history, we do not even know for certain who the “Johannes” was that gave his name to Johannesburg. Unlike most of the great metropolises of the world, the city didn’t grow up alongside a river or a sea. It is true though that it was hiding a river of gold in its guts.

  Apart from its languages, Africa boasts a second natural resource, its youth. What aging society has ever undertaken a revolution? In 1789, France was the youngest and most populated country in Europe. Bonaparte and his fifteen years of wars sacrificed two generations of young men, breaking this dynamic early on.

  There will be ten billion of us on earth by around 2050 – in other words, tomorrow morning. A quarter of us will live in Africa. Unlike China, it will be a young and certainly entrepreneurial population. It is beyond doubt that all this energy will lead to a great upheaval in the continent. With no hesitation, its youth have already seized the reins of modern communication. Young people are demanding freedom of expression, of creation, of circulation. They are insisting on decent medicine and accountability from their leaders. This will be a nasty time for the gerontocrats.

  Young people will not put up with uneducated leaders. “One trembles at the idea that a number of key figures will sit on governments in Addis-Ababa or Cairo without knowing a single word of their country’s history …,” professor Ki-Zerbo already believed in 1972. Today intellectual curiosity is easier to satisfy. Yet one must have electricity to plug in one’s computer or television. The appetite for knowledge is immense, it leaps ov
er barriers. I believe it is capable of swallowing mountains.

  A third strength of Africa is its long practice of dialogue. The virtues of palaver are ignored in societies that are built on making rapid decisions. Shaped by the continual news channels and programmed debates as we are, one wonders sometimes how much time there is for deep reflection, for profitable exchange. Dialogue is a long, imponderable process, yet it generates energy and possibility. Indeed, it is essential in order to keep the majority from abusing its power. Botswana’s exemplary democratic past was based on the ancient practice of kgotla, an assembly of elders. For lack of continuous debate, regime changes in Tunisia, Libya, and in Egypt, risked soiling the beautiful image of the “Arab Spring.”

  I remember a Soviet apparatchik dropping in at the weekly Jeune Afrique one day and explaining to us that a one-party state was good for Africa. My African colleagues (and I) were beside ourselves. What contempt for the continent! Democracy, the universal ideal, the cement for durable development – what possible reason could there be for depriving Africa of it?

  It is heartening to note that the number of democracies is growing in the world, with multi-party systems, a free press, and the blossoming of civil society. Various authoritarian regimes are showing signs of softening. The Internet has contributed to this. Incidentally, the African Union doesn’t invite the instigators of coups d’état to its meetings. From now on its members intend to act directly as intermediaries in internal quarrels.

  In the art of resolving conflicts, Africa is in the process of implementing its own methods. Mandela and his companions provided a striking example by negotiating a delicate transition in South Africa. Although the outcome has earned the admiration of the world, we must always remember the terrible violence that reigned in the country between 1990 and 1994: civil war between the Zulus in Natal, dawn massacres in townships, demonstrations repressed in bloodshed, coups d’état in the Bantustans. The wisdom of former prisoners from Robben Island ensured that minorities were offered guarantees. A modern constitution, a unified practice of power-sharing and a decentralized administration laid the foundation for a normalized public life. Apartheid ended in history’s trash heap.