Africa: Mother and Muse

Abstract

U prays the hero of a recent novel by an African writer, Oh, Mother Africa, make me strong for the work I must do. Don't forget me in the many you nurse. I would make you great. I would have the world respect you and your children. I would have the sun of freedom shine over you once more. This is a prayer which suggests the complex relationship to their mother which the sons of Africa are feeling-a kind of creative dependence in which the matriarch is felt as ur-source of sustenance in the tasks which she herself, struggling through a maze of cultural confusion, demands. Th-is complex relationship is not always equally well understood, nor explored with equal sensitivity, by all the young Africans who feel themselves caught up in it, but, in any case, there is no free for them: every act is weighted with an enormous symbolism. With the Negroes in our own South, so apparently casual a decision as which seat one takes on a bus has willy-nilly its significance as symbol, because by such acts dignity is gained or given up; imagine a whole life which is thus symbolic and, it would seem, one has begun to open a way into the growing body of literature which is being produced today by native African writers. It is a literature whiclh may best be appreciated if one remembers always its primary ftunction as dramatic gesture. In tlhe same novel from which we have already quoted, A Wreath for Udomo by Peter Abrahams (a South African now living