African Literature Today and African Theatre The James Gibbs Connection

Abstract

AFRICAN LITERATURE TODAY, in a series of thirty thematic collections edited by Eldred Durosimi Jones and now Ernest Emenyonu, has charted for almost half a century the growth of writing of novels, plays, and poetry in Africa. For a third of those issues, James Gibbs has used his editorship of the book-review pages to introduce titles from the numerous publishers within Africa to an international audience, as well as submitting books published across the world to critical attention. In 1998, James Gibbs, with Martin Banham, Femi Osofisan, and Jane Plastow, founded African Theatre to concentrate on performance as much as on writing. These two thematic series provide discussion, debate, and critical evaluation of outstanding African achievement in literature and drama.African Literature TodayIn a 1989 lecture at the University of Guelph, Chinua Achebe said:In 1962 we saw the gathering together of a remarkable generation of young African men and women who were to create within the next decade a corpus of writing which is today seriously read and critically evaluated in many parts of the world. It was an enormously important moment, and year, in the history of modem African literature. The gathering took place at Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda.The other event of 1962 was not as widely publicized as the Makerere Conference but it was to prove at least as portentous. It was the decision by one farsighted London publisher to launch the African Writers Series on the basis of no more than three or four published titles. Conventional wisdom in the book business at the time was inclined to dismiss the whole enterprise as a little harebrained. But in the next twenty-five years this series was to publish more than three hundred titles and establish itself without any doubt as the largest and best library of African literature in existence. [...]As for the African Writers Series in that same eventful year of 1962,1 was invited to be its founding editor and I was to spend a considerable part of my literary energy in the following ten years wading through a of good, bad, and indifferent writing that seemed in some miraculous way to have been waiting behind the sluice gates for the trap to be released.1This was some twenty-five years after the start of the African Writers Series. He was at a conference organized by Professor Douglas Killam. Thanks to the calm persuasion of Chinua Achebe, Heinemann had plunged into this torrent. The paperback African Writers Series took off half a century ago in 1962 because there were so few hardback novels to publish in paperback. Aspiring writers in Africa saw the photographs of Africans on the back of the orange covers and got the idea that they, too, might get published. The 1960s were alive with newly published African writers. Mbari led the way with seventeen founding titles. Heinemann was far from alone in its search for unpublished scripts by unknown writers. Oxford, Longman, Collins Fontana, and Andre Deutsch began to fmd a responsive market in Africa in the new campus and school bookshops. Everything seemed possible as the countries of Africa became independent. The market for these books was first and foremost in Africa and was based on educational institutions, schools, colleges, and the increasing number of universities.How should serious readers critically evaluate the books published from Achebe's torrent of writing? Eldred Durosimi Jones at Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone saw the need for the encouragement of critical standards and in 1968 persuaded Heinemann to start the critical journal African Literature Today.There had been passionate debates among the writers at the Makerere conference in June-July 1962 about what African criteria should apply. The question of language led to ferocious interchanges among this new crop of writers. Obi Nwakanma wrote:On the Monday morning [...] the conference took off in earnest, with Okigbo leading the discussions on the conference theme: 'What is African literature? …