Is There An African in the Room

Is There An African in the Room Talk at St Andrew's Africa Summit – February 23, 2019 (St. Andrew's)

NII AYIKWEI PARKES Mi sane’ɛ djei mɔfɛɛmɔ sane Mi sane’ɛ djei mɔfɛɛmɔ sane How many people understood that? Well, in the past (and to some degree, still) that would be enough for someone to declare all of you who didn’t understand uncouth savages - for how could you not understand simple language? - and nominate himself (for it was often HIM) qualified to write about you.

My story is not everyone’s story is what I said - and I said it in one of the 67 languages of my country, one of approximately 2500 languages of the continent of Africa. So few of you understood me.

That disconnect essentially lies at the heart of the distortion of the African story - correction, of African stories, of African histories.

If we consider the indisputable fact that everyone of you, hearing my talk in English would summarise it differently, then we have versions of every story, variations on the truth in just one language.

Fact: the average person in Africa speaks a minimum of two languages.

Every language is rooted in concepts, contexts and philosophies about the world, so imagine the versions possible in a place with 1.2 billion people and at least 5000 language versions of every story not even taking into account the possible twists of religion, gender and age. That is the size of the central problem of trying to pin down what it means to be African. Yet that is what the rest of the world has tried to do for so long - and they keep wondering why they get it so wrong.

Because the world has so diligently and persistently imposed its story on Africa (starting with the map of Africa – on the large and small scale) art in Africa has often been concerned with challenging accepted stereotypes.

Of course, there are two dangers therein - one is that artists can sometimes carry the burden of ‘representation’ which suffocates the wilder children of their imaginations, the other is that in

‘representing’ we are prone to making essential elements of culture that were fluid before the encounter with imperialist narrative. This dynamic creates a natural tension that, if an artist is savvy, can energise their work.

Much of the early post-colonial art production from the continent is informed - in different ways by this tension. Mongo Beti’s assistant to “Christ” in The Poor Christ of Bomba is a satirical observer of that tension, Chinua Achebe’s Okwonkwo in Things Fall Apart is literally destroyed by the tension of fluidity versus inflexibility that is birthed by the colonial encounter. We see a modern slightly more nuanced exploration in Jennifer Makumbi’s recent Kintu.

Indeed, as artists begin to question the many fixed points of what is traditional and what the imperial narrative claims to be true about the world and continent of Africa, more nuanced approaches are becoming the hallmark of emerging artists.

The angles of enquiry are many. An important one is the exploration of loss; what are we losing living in artificially created countries where our leaders have adopted almost wholesale Western methods of academic teaching and everything traditional has been left in the domestic sphere? What are we losing in context when we study our own history? What do we lose when we do things that are ostensibly as simple as Anglicising spellings?

Well, you find symbolic disconnections of families where a cousin born in a Francophone state is called Traore and one born in an Anglophone one is called Tarawally. You find a place called Baatsonaa spelled with a C that doesn’t exist in my language and you lose the historic and geographic context that tells you it is the place of large leafed trees baa (leaf) tso (tree) naa (source). That happens everywhere in the world by the way - the difference is in what is lost when it is not documented and what the interests of the political class are.

Which brings us to the final tension for the African artist - the political class. The fine Malawian poet, Jack Mapanje, once told me that he had the dictator Kamuzu Banda to thank for his cryptic writing style - it was the only way he could bamboozle the censors.

Ultimately, the artist from Africa starts off with a fairly large rucksack of possible burdens which they can choose to carry or not. One of those burdens, perhaps the largest, is what it means to be African such an abstract and contrived thing! What is interesting is more and more, artists are responding by just being themselves.

When Serge Attukwei Clottey, a visual artist from both my country of Ghana and my nation of Ga

people, says “I don’t differentiate my work from my community because they are part of it”, he is also saying that I don’t buy into the notion of an individual, a ‘lone wolf’ (to borrow a term used only to describe American domestic terrorists) artist or the idea that the best place for art is in a gallery - an idea he further entrenches by displaying his work on the sea shore, literally paving streets with art etc.

That is one way of being an African artist.

When Warsan Shire, the Somali-Kenyan-British (note the African hyphens) poet, whose work I publish, writes of a Somali grandfather dying and only wishing to go home, she is exploding the myth of the West as the place where everyone wants to go. That is one way of expressing what it means to be African.

I can tell you the story about my J1 visa, given when I went on a short teaching residency in the United States of America. It was a J1 because that's what the university was used to applying for, but it blighted my trips to the US for another 5 years, because immigration officers at the airports could never understand why I had a J1, entitling me to stay for four years but I had chosen to live between Ghana and the UK. When in my novel, Tail of the Blue Bird, I put certain English words in italics, I am pointing out that the other words were part of centuries of civilisation before the encounter with the West. That is a way of saying what Africa has always been - a place with a history before the documentation of others, a place that is in flux, that was fluid before and will always evolve.

All of these works are also hybrids - Attukwei works with photography, film, illustration, sculpture, public acts… constantly changing; Warsan Shire’s work is narrative and lyric at once, historic and contemporary, she’s collaborating on film, active as an advocate. Victor Ehikhamenor, who is here at this summit, is a fiction writer, essayist, journalist, photographer, mixed-media installation artist, illustrator, famous lambaster of Damien Hirst (which, proving the point he made in his critique, was the first time I noted his name). In the end, I feel that fluidity is probably the only thing that can be identified as a continent-wide trait, but beyond that and because of that we are incredibly unique.

I will tell you two stories to end. I curate a series called the African Writers’ Evening at the Southbank Centre in London, which is on hiatus at the moment, but in one of the events I had a South African writer – Caucasian – reading.

After the event an English lady came to speak to me, telling me she thought it was an ‘authentic’ African event but we had a white writer. I smiled. First I asked her if she would consider Alexandre Dumas a French writer and Pushkin a Russian writer and she said yes. So I said, you realise they both

had African ancestry? I’ve never seen anyone look so surprised, but, to my surprise, she nodded. Then I said, for what it’s worth, I was born in Europe, they (I pointed at the author) were born in Africa. At that point, she turned a very authentic red.

I'm not saying that my reponse was the definitive answer to the question of who can be African; the point here is that there is an idea of Africa and who can and can’t represent the continent, what words can and can’t describe it. Victor Ehikhamenor speaks about the words ‘primitive’ and ‘ethnographic’ as go-to vocabulary to describe the visual art of the continent of Africa. My encounter was the literary equivalent.

The second story is one I tell all the time. I call it my Chilli Con Carne story. It's really about how perspectives shape judgement. I arrived in Manchester one cold September afternoon to start university. I soon settled in and, as is the custom in most places, at some point a party was thrown – a house party. It was at the shared house of one of my white English classmates – great girl. However, as a Ghanaian, I was taken aback by the invitation right away, because they asked me to bring my own bottle of whatever I want to drink. See, where I come from, you don't throw a party if you don't have the ability to 'refresh' your guests – it's the height of folly, it's plain uncivilised. Still, in the interest of good fraternal relations with my classmates, I took my Guinness and went. The party had a good atmosphere, they played some Cranberries and Suede and Neneh Cherry, I had a few decent conversations. Then there was a call for us to come and eat some Chilli con Carne. Now, where I'm from, when you say chilli, you mean spice, so for me the name was misplaced in the bland mix of rice and redness I received, and there was barely any carne to speak of. But, I was raised well by my mother so I ate and made polite noises. The surprise came when I was leaving and I was asked at the door to contribute £2 towards the Chilli con Carne I had eaten. To end the story before I rant, let's just say that I did not make polite noises and it was the last party I went to thrown by my English classmates. We maintained a very cordial lecture-hall-and-clubs-based realtionship after that.

Now, if I took that experience and documented it in a book to represent Europe, say the only book on Europe taught around the world: how people are so poor that they invite you to parties when they can’t afford to have them, how their food is tasteless etc. We’d be in an interesting parallel universe.

Luckily, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting Spain, Slovenia, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Austria etc. I’ve had better hospitality experiences since that night in Manchester. I know better. In Africa, many people from the Western world visit a single country and declare themselves experts. Emerging art from Africa, I feel is handing these people a mirror and saying ‘take a good look at yourself before you come and try to define me.’

As I have already argued, the artist from Africa starts off with a fairly large rucksack of possible burdens which they can choose to carry or not. However the idea of choice is a vital variable here.

When people speak of poverty in Africa, I don’t think of purchasing power; for me poverty is the lack of choices - you don’t wear what you’d like but what you are given (I’m thinking here of my mother’s generation in Ghana who would not be considered professional enough for jobs unless their hair was permed and they wore Western-style suits – needless to say, my mother was self-employed); you don’t define your borders, you are given them; your identity – as person or artist – is a list of characteristics you didn’t write.

So the larger question becomes whether artists from Africa can choose not to carry any burdens – the burden of false representation, of having been clichéd into something you are not, is a kind of erasure by masking.

Arundhati Roy in her essay 2012 essay for Guernica magazine, We Call This Progress, states that “if you know something and then you keep quiet, it’s like dying”; in the case of the artist from Africa, I would push that argument in a more radical direction and say if you know something (in this case, yourself) and you are kept quiet it’s like being murdered; Nobody. Wants. To. Die.