Gods and Soldiers Read Free

the early 1990s, a mix of house and traditional chants). In an excerpt from Mhlongo’s novel Dog Eat Dog, a black university student tries to outwit a pair of corrupt cops who have caught him drinking in public.
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    Chinua Achebe, both in Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, highlighted the growing tensions between traditional African societies and Western values and norms, which not only challenged but were often opposed to African mores and customs. That dynamic continues still, as revealed in these stories, a dynamic further complicated by the different realities of country and city, of tribal laws and secular governance, of religion and tribe, of the legacy of the past and the promise of the future. This future faces the additional modern problems of AIDS, multinational wars, and, with rapidly spreading Internet access across the continent, greater challenges to tradition and culture.
    Nelson Mandela once said that “Africa always brings something new.” Now, more than ever, this is true. My hope is that this handful of wonderful writing will open the doorway to a greater exploration of African writing and culture. For links and information about further reading of African literature, you can log on to GodsandSoldiers.com .
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    â€”ROB SPILLMAN, February 2009

• Africa •

• West Africa •

CHINUA ACHEBE
    â€¢ Nigeria •
    THE AFRICAN WRITER
AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
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    IN JUNE 1952, there was a writers’ gathering at Makerere, impressively styled: “A Conference of African Writers of English Expression.” Despite this sonorous and rather solemn title it turned out to be a very lively affair and a very exciting and useful experience for many of us. But there was something which we tried to do and failed—that was to define “African Literature” satisfactorily.
    Was it literature produced in Africa or about Africa? Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole continent or South of the Sahara, or just Black Africa? And then the question of language. Should it be in indigenous African languages or should it include Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, etc.?
    In the end we gave up trying to find an answer partly—I should admit—on my own instigation. Perhaps we should not have given up so easily. It seems to me from some of the things I have since heard and read that we may have given the impression of not knowing what we were doing, or worse, not daring to look too closely at it.
    A Nigerian critic, Obi Wali, writing in Transition, volume 10, said: “Perhaps the most important achievement of the conference . . . is that African literature as now defined and understood leads nowhere.”
    I am sure that Obi Wali must have felt triumphantly vindicated when he saw the report of a different kind of conference held later at Fourah Bay to discuss African literature and the University curriculum. This conference produced a tentative definition of African literature as follows: “Creative writing in which an African setting is authentically handled or to which experiences originating in Africa are integral.” We are told specifically that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness qualifies as African literature while Graham Greene’s The Heart of the Matter fails because it could have been set anywhere outside Africa.
    A number of interesting speculations issue from this definition, which admittedly is only an interim formulation designed to produce an indisputably desirable end, namely, to introduce African students to literature set in their environment. But I could not help being amused by the curious circumstance in which Conrad, a Pole writing in English, could produce African literature while Peter Abrahams would be ineligible should he write a novel based on his experiences in the West Indies.
    What all this suggests to me is that you cannot cram African