Radical Arts Forum with the author Duduzile Sokhele held a workshop
to use literature to empower the community, last Saturday
Lindiwe Mavimbela, Duduzile Sokhele, Xolile Ngcobo and
Nthabiseng Manana at the Creative Writing Workshop in Duduza last
Saturday.
Duduza – Last Saturday, Radical Arts Forum held a workshop with author Duduzile Sokhele to use literature to empower women.
The forum’s secretary, Bheki Radebe, says that their task is to revive theatre and literature.
“This is just one of the programmes we use to achieve our mission.”
Sokhele, a social worker by profession, was born and bred in Duduza.
“I started writing books in 2010 but I didn’t focus on women empowerment until 2013.”
In her latest offering, Within the Private Space of Black South
African Women: The Open Secret, she explains how life as a black woman
can be full of obstacles.
“It is how we come to terms with our differences and how we overcome our challenges together that makes us strong.”
Sokhele believes that the public library is one of the best resources in the community.
“I am disappointed in the state of this place because I used to study here.
“That is why I will use every avenue available to me, to make this library function to its full capacity.”
She says that people need to realise that the library is not just for children.
“My passion is to get women to read.”
Sokhele explains that she aims to dispel the notion: ‘If you want to hide something from a black person, put it in a book.’
“I also want to inspire young writers to push beyond their circumstances.”
Thirty-five-year-old teacher Xolile Ngcobo came to the workshop after she saw the invite on social media.
“Until now, I did not know that all of us have the potential to be writers.
“Her demonstrations proved to me that we all have a story to tell.”
Ngcobo says the workshop left her inspired enough to start writing.
Jennifer Makumbi
is a Ugandan novelist and short story writer. She won the African
Region and the overall Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2014 as well as
the Kwani? Manuscript Prize in 2013 for her novel Kintu.
What are you doing in the Nairobi?
I
was invited by the Goethe Institut for their Literary Crossroads series
to talk about my work as an African writer. I am quite excited to be
back in Nairobi because this is one of my favourite cities in Africa and
this is where it all started for me. It is wonderful for me to be back
here, especially now that my book has been around for some time and
people know me.
How did it all start here in Nairobi as you say?
I
wrote a novel that at the time was called The Kintu Saga while in
Britain. I tried to get it published in Britain and failed. Then there
was the manuscript project that Kwani? was running. I sent my script
through and, luckily, I won the prize. Part of the prize was for the
publication of the manuscript into a book. That was my first novel and
it got published in Kenya, which is close to Uganda.
There
is a following here in Kenya that is very close to my heart because I
did not expect Kenyans to take to the book the way they did and I am so
thankful for that. I may refuse to go to the US or other places but
anytime I am invited back to Kenya, I am keen. I feel that it is a
privilege to be here.
What is the book Kintu about?
It
goes back to the 1700s when a chief in the Buganda Kingdom
inadvertently kills his adoptive son and fails to go to the biological
father and confess what he has unfortunately done. The biological
father, who is non-Bugandan, suspecting that something has happened,
goes back to his master and asks for his son back but does not get the
truth. So he tells the chief that if his boy is dead, then his children
and children’s children would pay. The curse is passed down the family
throughout the ages, mirroring the curse that Eve carries in the Bible.
The story is brought to the present, where four of Kintu’s descendants
show the manifestation of the curse in their lives.
What did this book do to your career when it was published?
It
was surprisingly well received in Africa; I just did not expect that.
In a way it was a relief because sometimes a writer writes a book and it
is received well in the West and you come to Africa and you ask if
people have read this book and everyone is “What? Which one are you
talking about?” I was so lucky that I got to be known in Africa first.
The West got to know about me much later. The book thus travelled from
Africa to America and not the other way round. There is also a lot of
interest from Germany, from France, and Britain (where I initially could
not find a publisher) at the moment.
You say that you have been now published in the US. How did you get a publisher there?
(Blogger)
Magunga (Williams) here gave the book to an American guy called Aaron
Bady and told him that this was one of the most exciting books to come
out of Africa recently. Bady told me that he read it on the flight back
and he loved it so much that when he arrived in the US, he couldn’t stop
talking about it. He contacted Transit Books, an American publishing
house, who then approached me. At that point, Ohio University Press had
also approached me to publish it and they were offering the book to
mainly a university audience. They were good as I was assured of
universities teaching it but I wanted the book to get to the streets, to
the people, rather than just to students.
So
I chose Transit Books as they promised that they would also get access
to the students market. I also picked them because they are a small
publisher. You want a small publisher who is passionate about selling
your book rather than these big publishers who are churning out many
books that sometimes get lost under the pile.
Is the book out in the US already? How has the response been?
The
book is out and they did a limited print of 3,000 copies and within two
weeks they were back to the press. It was incredible; they don’t know
how it happened. The thing with Kintu is that it has been word
of mouth and African bloggers and I am incredibly indebted to those two.
Most of the Americans that read it, the first thing they do is Google
and they find all these blogs saying wonderful things.
You
took part the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2014 for your story
‘Let’s Tell the Story Properly.’ You won in the African category and
later the overall prize, making you the first and only African to do so.
I
can’t explain the feeling. When I submitted the story, I did not even
expect it to get shortlisted. It got shortlisted then when it won the
African prize I said to myself, “Yes this is it, I have made it.” Then
later they sent me an e-mail telling me that I had won it (the overall
prize) but should not tell anybody. When they announced my win, they put
me on a plane to receive it in Uganda.
It
was wonderful for me because my family had no idea that I was writing. I
had told them that I was doing a literature degree. When I finished my
MA then I told them, “I am doing a PHD now.” My mum asked when I
finished with my PHD what that meant in terms of jobs and I said, “I’ll
start teaching at the university,” and she saw that that made sense. It
was only when I arrived back in Uganda and I told them that I won this
prize that they turned around and said, “So this is what she has been
doing?”
What can we expect next from you?
There
will be a collection of short stories based in Uganda and in
Manchester, where I live, published by Transit Books in the US. They
should be coming out in 2019.
Do
you feel like there is a new age in African writing? Do you feel like
something has been happening in the last 10 or 15 years?
Oh
yeah. As much as I am a writer, I was a student and a teacher of
literature. When I went to study creative writing in Britain, I did
literature along the way and I had to do research on who was coming up
in 2001. Nothing was happening.
You
would find people were presenting papers saying that nothing was
happening in African literature. Ben Okri happened in 1990, but what
happened after that? Nothing much apart from, perhaps, Yvonne Vera from
Zimbabwe. Then (Chimamanda) Adichie happened and (Helen) Oyeyemi
happened and Helon Habila happened and now everybody started happening.
And we were all like where have you been all this time?
It’s
so big what is happening that now I can’t afford to read other
literature. I am one of those people who must read every book that I
know of that has come out of Africa to see what is going on. As a writer
I don’t want to duplicate what’s out there. If something has been done
and it interests me, I want to be able to do it differently. So it is so
exciting, people are doing exciting things. It’s a fantastic time to be
an African writer right now.
Dr.
Emman Usman Shehu is the director of the International Institute of
Journalism (IIJ), Abuja and founding president of Abuja Writers Forum
(AWF) created in June 2008, to enhance the capacity of writers. In this
interview the author of ‘Icarus Rising’ talks about the challenges and
gains of running AWF and the Nigerian literary sphere.
Tell us about yourself, what led to the creation of Abuja Writers Forum (AWF) and the journey so far?
We came about because there was need for a platform that enhances the
capacity of writers devoid of politics. First of all, we have to know
that we do not have to belong to some large organisation before we can
achieve our objectives. So we proved that it is possible to go against
the tide as long as you believe in your vision. We have also shown that
capacity building is very important for Nigerian writers. For nine years
we have provided that for people interested in writing. Of course we
could have done a lot more but for the prevailing circumstance. But on
the whole I am satisfied because we have proven a point and we are
beginning to see the fruit of our intervention.
How has AWF influenced Nigeria’s literary sphere?
New names have been emerging in the Nigerian literary scene that can
be traced to the Abuja Writers Forum. For instance, Elnathan John’s
‘Born on a Tuesday’ initially came out as a short story which was
critiqued at our weekly critiquing sessions; many people have been
published in literary journals, locally and internationally, as a result
of capacity they acquired through our creative writing workshops. This
Year, two new poets have emerged, Aminat Aboje and Olumide Olaniyan.
Their published works were materials we critiqued at our sessions.
Is AWF only for emerging writers?
No. It is for the established, the intermediate or the budding
writers. AWF provides a platform for synergy so that there is a kind of
mentoring directly or indirectly. For instance we have a guest writer
session every month which started in June 2008. That was our first major
activity that announced our arrival on the scene. We have since brought
in authors from all over the world. We also had authors who had their
first ever public reading here. So basically it is not limited to
Nigerian writers.
Whether you are an established writer or an unknown writer, the idea
is to have a forum where you bring your work in progress, and we
critique and offer suggestions, in a friendly way.
How was the support when you wanted to start?
It was only in Nigeria that when I wanted to start I began to get
attacks left and right. It is very important we have this intervention;
it is even much more important in Nigeria where there is no funding. In
advanced economies, you have funding and grants for publishing, for
residency and fellowship; even for schools that want to run writing
programmes. We don’t have any of these in Nigeria, and so anyone that is
able to identify a place where he can contribute to the development of
Nigerian literature, should use it.
It is sad that in a country like Nigeria for example, how many
writing workshops do we have? We are talking of over a hundred million
people. In the United States of America, however, every week, there is a
writing workshop or a writing conference either by private intervention
or by national intervention. Canada took the same approach, they
subsidized the prices for these workshops and that transformed their
literary sphere to a major global force. In the 60’s who was talking
about the Canadian literature.
Ghanaian writers have been moribund for many years. They realized
they needed to do something which led to various interventions. In 2002,
because of such intervention, a Ghanaian won the Commonwealth price. So
these interventions are very important, that’s why I would encourage as
many people as possible to do whatever intervention they can because
nobody can tell your story better than yourself.
Why do you think government is not at the forefront of these interventions?
Who are the people in government, are they people who are
pro-intellectualism? Are they people who are pro-creativity? A lot of
people in government are hustlers who are thinking of how much they can
amass; they do not know the importance of creativity and how literature
can enhance a country.
One of the reasons Nigerians became known internationally is
literature. So in a country where you have leadership that understands
this, certainly it would want to intervene. Look at America for
instance, there can hardly be an inauguration without a poet coming to
read during the ceremony.
The day the Senate President would say today is World Book Day, and
we want a Nigerian writer to come and read in the Senate, we would know
the day has come in terms of appreciation of the place of writers.
Any plans to expand AWF outside Abuja?
Some people feel that has always been the agenda but that has never
been our plan, our plan is to focus on what we can do here in Abuja.
Readers complain of lack of books in the bookshops; that they
can hardly get some books unless they personally contact the authors?
That is one of the reasons we have the Guest Writers Forum to provide
a platform for interaction between published authors and the public.
Because such structures do not exist; we don’t even have the basic
marketing structure. The major publishing houses in Nigeria, how many
copies do they produce? Usually it is about a thousand copies, and how
many branches do they have across the country? So already there is a
problem. In a country of over a hundred million people, you produce 1000
copies; and you don’t even have a distributor. Even if you supply 50
copies per state, where in those states are you going to put them; where
are the outlets?
Until there’s the structure, publishers and authors will have to go
an extra mile to push their books. So if you are an author in Nigeria,
it means you have to study the industry, you have to understand how it
works.
Do you think Nigeria will eventually get the structure?
It depends on if we think literature is important; even Nollywood
still has not gotten the structures right in terms of distribution so
it’s a general problem and that is why piracy is thriving. As a result
of lack of structures we are now left with having our works on school
syllabus, and that is not how it should be.
What is the way forward?
I have told them if you want to have distribution outlets in the
country, it is very simple. What stops NLNG literature prize partnering
with say Mike Adenuga, that any of the shortlisted books would be
distributed through Conoil fuelling station shopping marts?
People want to buy this NLNG literature prize shortlisted books
because they perceive them as having quality but they don’t know where
to buy them.
Do you advocate for self -publishing?
There is nothing wrong with self-publishing if you do it properly.
What is publishing? Publishing is putting out your work to the public.
People will only buy your book if it has got quality and if is
available.
The important thing is that you follow the same process the major
publishers are following. In other words, what is the quality of the
work you want published.
Of the books you have authored which one is your favourite?
Every one of my books is important to me because, each book emerged
at a point in time; it’s a reflection of that period of my life. My
first book ‘The Questions of Big Brother’ is important because it was my
first book ‘Open Sesame’ is important because it came after ‘Questions
of Big Brother’. ‘Icarus Rising’ is very important because for 12 years
we have been working on it.
I learnt a lesson from it , do not announce your forthcoming work,
because when I announced ‘Icarus Rising’, I never knew it was going to
take me 12 years.
Mazisi Kunene is the much-celebrated author of epics, such as Emperor Shaka the Great (UNodumehlezi KaMenzi) and Anthem of the Decades (Inhlokomo Yeminyaka), as well as numerous poems, short stories, nursery rhymes and proverbs that amount to a collection of more than 10 000 works.
He was born in aMahlongwa in 1930, a small rural village on
the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa. Notwithstanding his
cultural duties as a young man born into Zulu tradition, his calling as
an imbongi was taken very seriously by his father and grandfather who
encouraged him to write. Professor Kunene described this ‘calling’ to
write as ‘something [that] is not me, it is the power that rides me like
a horse’.
Kunene lectured widely and was Professor in African
Literature at Stanford University and in African Literature and
Languages at the University of California, Los Angeles. On his return to
South Africa, he was Professor in African Languages at the University
of KwaZulu-Natal.
He went into exile in the 1960s for more than 34 years,
during which time he established and managed the African National
Congress office in London and later moved to Los Angeles with his family
to pursue his academic career. In UNodumehlezi KaMenzi
(Emperor Shaka the Great), which he wrote during this exile period, he
positions Shaka as a legendary thinker, who had great skill as a
strategic and military genius.
This vision acknowledges and re-imagines Shaka as a unifying
cultural and political force that defined the cohesive Zulu nation.
Kunene projects Shaka into the mythical ancestral universe that affirms
the deep cultural lineage of the African world view.
This reprinted English edition is published with the isiZulu
edition on the tenth anniversary of his death, embracing Kunene’s
original dream to have his work published as intended in the original
isiZulu form.
The symbolic and cultural significance of these publications
begins a process of re-evaluating and recontextualising Kunene’s
writing oeuvre.
Book details
Emperor Shaka the Great: A Zulu Epic by Mazisi Kunene
EAN: 9781869143152
The Market Theatre Foundation and Exclusive Books have teamed up to create a new reading hub for the Hillbrow community.
They
have revamped the 121-year-old Windybrow Arts Centre, which used to be a
performance theatre, into a reading area where the community,
particularly children, can choose from more than 2 000 Pan-African book
titles.
“We are pleased that we can create a safe space for
children and adults alike to have access to books, to care for them and
to treasure the stories that the books contain,” said Benjamin Trisk,
the chief executive officer (CEO) of Exclusive Books.
“We
envisioned a dynamic partnership with Exclusive Books to make stories
and literature from the African continent and the diaspora become more
accessible to a wider audience,” said Ismail Mahomed, CEO of The Market
Theatre Foundation.
The
Windybrow Arts Centre will open its doors to the Exclusive Books
Pan-African Reading Lounge for adults and The Exclusive Books
Pan-African Reading Room for children on July 18 to mark Nelson Mandela
International Day.
- On July 18 Khanyi Mbau, the queen of bling,
will join the team from SABC lifestyle show Top Billing and spend their
67 minutes honouring the late statesman by visiting a home in Midrand
caring for children suffering from cancer. A day of fun and motivation
has been planned.
- Albany Bakeries and its brand ambassador, DJ
Zinhle, will make 1 000 sandwiches for the African Children’s Feeding
Scheme. Volunteers from Johannesburg only are welcome but will have to
apply and be available to participate on July 25.
Maimouna is trying to get audiences interested in folktales again
Folktales and the art of
traditional storytelling are in danger of being lost and Nairobi-based
performer Maïmouna Jallow is on a mission to reverse the trend.
But on her journey to revive the art she has also discovered the relevance of performing contemporary stories.
There is something mystical about Zanzibar’s Stone Town. It is a
place where past and present collide, and where a mosaic of sights and
smells from across the Indian Ocean weave themselves together down
narrow alleyways.
It is perhaps fitting then, that my exploration of traditional East
African folktales began here, leading me on an unexpected journey into
storytelling and adapting contemporary novels.
In 2015, feeling nostalgic for the tales of Anansi the Spider that I
had grown up with in West Africa, I travelled to the historic centre of
Zanzibar in search of folktales.
Stone Town’s narrow streets and old buildings proved the perfect setting to rediscover old folktales
On arrival, I went straight to the Old Fort, an imposing 17th Century
structure built by the Omanis to defend the island from the Portuguese.
There, with the help of the painter Hamza Aussie, I met a group of
women who owned curio shops that lined the grassy courtyard.
I asked them if they would share the folktales of their youth with
me, and within a couple of hours, I had recorded a dozen stories, or
rather, fragments of stories.
Around us, children pressed inwards, eager to hear their tales. But
even in those magical hours, I started to feel like I was grasping at
clouds. The women had to dig deep into the recess of their minds as they
tried to piece together scattered bits of ancient tales.
Like an old discarded puzzle, some pieces seemed to be lost forever.
Maimouna heard traditional stories from women in Zanzibar
The children around us, whilst enchanted by their tales, would save
their coins to play computer games in the gaming rooms that had sprouted
alongside shops that sold henna and incense.
It seemed that even in this small town, famed for its quaint antiquity, folktales were dying. I needed to understand why.
Yes, television was to blame, and so was the breakdown of the
extended family, but how had we so easily lost such a fundamental kernel
of our existence?
Later that week, I had the good fortune of meeting Haji Gora Haji,
the Island’s poet laureate, a living fountain of wondrous tales.
As I listened to him recount a story about the infamous Hare duping
Tortoise into buying a piece of land that turned out to be a beach,
which Tortoise only found out about when the tide came in, I wondered
whether part of the problem is that so many of these stories are far
removed from our realities today.
Would our urbanised kids understand Haji’s story?
Heck,
even I needed Hamza to give me the annotated version. As he explained
it, there was a time when many people on the island were being conned
into buying land without title deeds, so this was a warning to people to
be wary of unscrupulous salesmen.
Indeed, folktales have always been a vital way to transmit important
information, as well as moral lessons, and as such, they are often
rooted in specific places and contexts.
And as much as the purist in me wanted to believe that folktales are
not only timeless but also universal, I started to think that perhaps
one way to preserve folktales was to re-imagine them so that they would
resonate with children and adults today.
Back in Nairobi, I launched an online contest, inviting African
writers to re-write traditional folktales but with a contemporary twist.
We got a mixed bag of entries, some which addressed war and exile,
others that questioned our modern mores. I too began writing stories
that merged the old with the new, for example, drawing parallels between
slavery and the indiscriminate killing of young black men in America.
I began performing these stories, at times using video footage of
real events to ground them in reality, but preserving the structure and
style of traditional folktales. The result was as hybrid as me, and
whilst I worried about veering off track, I knew that are so many of us
who inhabit multiple worlds.
The success of this experiment spurred me to push the boundaries even
further and to use oral storytelling to bring African literature to new
audiences by adapting novels for performance. I have author Lola
Shoneyin thank for this.
The first time I read her acclaimed novel, The Secret Lives of Baba
Segi’s Wives, the women in the story possessed me. They were hilarious.
And they jostled for space in my mind, speaking loudly, and demanding to
be seen.
My initial reaction was to think, “someone needs to turn this into a
movie”. But soon, I realised that I wanted to tell this story.
One-woman show
It was about patriarchy, sexual abuse, polygamy, poverty, education,
love, friendship and so many issues that I wanted to talk about, and I
felt that performance storytelling could be a gateway to have open
discussions on the serious questions raised by the novel.
So I set about adapting the book into a 50-minute one-woman show.
Then, I dug into my bookshelves and pulled out other novels that I
thought would translate beautifully into performed stories. I worked
with five other women, an eclectic mix of poets, actors and writers, and
together we started to bring African novels to life.
These were not plays. Each novel was adapted and retold by just one
teller. We used traditional elements of African oral storytelling like
call and response and each time, the teller would build a relationship
with the audience and create a different form of magic.
The response was tremendous. Audiences told us that we had brought
books to life. Some said they did not read and were grateful to still be
able to enjoy the terrific literature coming out of Africa.
Many subsequently bought the novels so that they could enjoy the full details that had to be left out in the adaptations.
As an African literature major, it dawned on me that my journey had
come full circle: folktales had led me back to contemporary novels and
opened the door to storytelling. So perhaps I have not veered off track
after all.
The late Professor Kofi Awoonor used to say: “We weave new ropes
where the old ones left off.” And like Stone Town itself, I have simply
found a way to fuse past and present.
The power of the
Nigerian writer, Amos Tutuola’s (in pic) The Palm-Drinkard, the first
African novel to find international literary readership, after its
publication in 1952, can be immediately felt. Written in English, and
rooted in the Yoruba folk story tradition, the slim novel became a
sensation soon after it appeared in England and is now acknowledged as a
foundational novel in modern African literature.
Sample the initial paragraphs from The Palm-Drinkard:
“I was a palm-wine drinkard since I was a boy of ten years of age.
“My father got eight children and I was the eldest among them, all of
the rest were hard workers, but I myself was an expert palm wine
drunkard… I was drinking palm-wine from morning till night and from
night till morning. By hat tie I could not drink ordinary water at all
except palm-wine.
“But when my father noticed that I could not
do any work more than to drink, he engaged an expert palm-wine tapster
for me; he had no other work more than to tap palm-wine every day.
“So my father gave me a palm-tree farm which was nine miles square and
it contained 560,000 palm trees, and this palm-wine tapster was tapping
one hundred an d fifty kegs of palm-wine ever morning, but before 2
o’clock pm., I would have drunk all of it; after that he would go and
tap another 75 kegs in the evening which I would be drinking till
morning.”
The happy state of affairs wasn’t to continue for
long. The palm-wine tapster fell down from the palm tree and died. Not
finding any one who could tap palm-wine “to my requirement,” and
remembering that “old people were saying that the whole people who had
died in this world, did not go to heaven directly, but they were living
in one place somewhere in this world,” the novel’s hero sets out to find
out “where my palm-wine tapster who had died was.”
What
follows is an intoxicatingly rich adventure, where humans, strange
creatures, and spirits come and go with perfect ease. The rapid, yet
unhurried, turns of event, all told in a hypnotic oral story-telling
style which freely and masterfully bends English to serve its purposes,
is nourishment itself.
Tutuola’s short autobiographical note,
which appears as an Afterword to The Palm-Drinkard, tells us he had a
tough childhood. His father sent him to work as a servant in an
acquaintance’s house in Lagos, a town sixty kilometres from their native
village of Abeokuta, in return for a school education. The young
Tutuola did exceptionally well at school, but his master’s wife’s
cruelty, which constantly loaded him with household chores, proved hard
to endure. He went back to his father’s village and joined school there.
After a year, his father’s sudden death didn’t let him continue his
studies: “Now there was none of my family who volunteered to assist me
to further my studies.” His formal education ended at the sixth grade,
Tutuola worked odd jobs on the farm and elsewhere from then onward. Not
having completed his formal education, Tutuola has noted, meant being
able to work with a freer narrative imagination.
TS Eliot, the
poet, acquired the manuscript for publication with Faber and Faber. The
influential part played by Irish poet, Dylan Thomas’ high praise for
the novel, is also well known. His review in the Observer entitled,
“Blithe Spirits,” begins thus: “This is the brief, thronged, grisly and
bewitching story, or a series of stories, written in young English by a
West African about the journey of an expert and devoted palm wine
drinker,…” An excerpt from Thomas’ review, in fact, forms the epigraph
in the Nigerian writer, Wole Soyinka’s affectionate introduction to the
latest edition of The Palm Drinkard. Soyinka speculates that being
Irish, who had “not completely severed their umblical cords from the
earth of magic, fantasy, trolls, gnomes and goblins,” might explain the
poet’s enthusiasm for the novel.
The debates on the novel’s
reception have been charged. Was the West seeking exotica in it? Would
aspiring modern African writers be expected to dish out similarly
strange narrative forms? The questions would have been especially urgent
in the time of decolonization, when .writers in English from formerly
colonized countries wrestled with the kind of English to write for
giving authentic expression to their cultural experiences.
Sixty five years later, with the advantage of abundant caution about
avoiding stereotypy, the many pleasures of The Palm-Drinkard can be
enjoyed more freely. The inventiveness of new words and styles of phrase
are liberating: as Soyinka points out, the word “drinkard” does away
with the negative morality that sticks to the word “drunkard.”
Drawing attention to the continued appeal of The Palm-Drinkard, Soyinka
says “Who can conceive of the sea drying up? As long as there is a drop
of wine left to tap from the West African palm tree, Amos Tutuola lives
on.”
(The author teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru)
Mazisi Kunene is the much-celebrated author of epics, such as Emperor Shaka the Great (UNodumehlezi KaMenzi) and Anthem of the Decades (Inhlokomo Yeminyaka), as well as numerous poems, short stories, nursery rhymes and proverbs that amount to a collection of more than 10 000 works. 
