Theory, Literature, and Moral Considerations

In 1967, a group of prominent African writers met in Stockholm, Sweden, to discuss the role of the writer in the modern African nation. We were still in the early days of decolonization, and although disenchantment with what was later to be characterized as a compromised postcoloniality was beginning to enter literary texts, writers and intellectuals still believed that their works and words had an innate and functional capacity to intervene in everyday life and to transform the tenor and vehicle of political discourse. The artist had, after all, been an ally of the politician during the nationalist struggle, while becoming a writer had been one of the most important sources of legitimacy for the political class in Africa. For this reason, then, the African writers who were gathered at the historical Stockholm conference did not seem eager to make any distinction between art and politics; they had gathered to take stock of their situation within their respective polities and in relation to the then great dream of Pan-Africanism; they were not there to mourn the possible split between the artist and the political establishment, but to figure the character of the writer's commitment after decolonization. While the theme of the conference as it was recorded in Per Wästberg's The Modern Writer in Africa acknowledged a certain tension between the individuality of African writers and what appeared to be the collective mission of their art, the days when the writer would be pitted against the power of the state with sometime deadly consequences still appeared to be too far in the future. Indeed, when the African literary establishment turned to what might have then appeared to be the abstract question that had crept up at the conference--the "freedom of all men to express themselves without arbitrary restraint"--their condemnation was leveled at "the bans and prohibitions which have been imposed on writers and writings by the racist regimes of southern Africa," not their own governments (119). In those days, when the discourse of African freedom was articulated against the violence engendered by white South Africa, Rhodesia, and the Portuguese empire, there was still a lingering belief that the African artist occupied a special place in the order of things, that in the words of Per Wästberg, "the poet is there to celebrate and not to subvert society" (11).