Still beating the drum: critical perspectives on Lewis Nkosi

Abstract

Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner, eds. Still Beating the Drum: Critical on Lewis Nkosi. Cross/Cultures 81. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. xxxv + 375 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. No price reported. Cloth. Critics and avid readers of South literature will welcome this wideranging collection of works by and on Lewis Nkosi, the eminent playwright, novelist, poet, and literary critic. Erudite, well-researched essays plumb the depths of the diverse achievements of this complex writer, whom casey Motsisi once deemed angriest Angry Young Man. Those not already aware of Nkosi's contribution to literature, who may know him only as a writer cursorily discussed by WoIe Soyinka in 1976 in terms of a Salvationist ethic, will read in this volume about the nuanced perspectives of a postcolonial author who is both a and a committed South thinker. First encountered in Africa during his brief work with the legendary journal Drum in the late fifties, Nkosi remains today a prolific writer of articles and reviews for publications such as Contact, New African, Transition, the Guardian, and The London Review of Books. He is most recognized, however, for his fiction, having burst on the literary scene with the play The Rhythm of Violence in 1964, and having drawn extensive critical attention with his 1983 novel, Mating Birds. Nkosi's oeuvre is indeed impressive, from his contributions to literature to his projects in radio, television, and film, and he has had a distinguished career as a professor of literature in the United States and England. Part 3 of Still Beating the Drum, A Retrospective Selection, includes some of Nkosi's own essays representing a cross-section of his views on literature and culture. His essay Negritude: New and Old Perspectives is a good place for readers of Nkosi's criticism to start, as the essay reflects the complexity of history and of postcolonial perspectives on literature. Nkosi's view of the Francophone literary and cultural movement (analogous in some ways to the Anglophone African Personality perspective of Kwame Nkrumah) reflects his position as migrant intellectual and engage writer. Granting the movement's history an essential place in the study of literature at the outset, the essay traces negritude's intellectual influences, concluding with the genealogical metaphor of the Negritude family tree, which includes apart from the living heritage, Freudianism, Marxism, surrealism, and Romanticism (290). He looks closely at the commentaries of Abiola Irele and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose seminal Orphee noir (1948) Nkosi believes to be still among the most subtle commentaries written on negritude. Nkosi dismisses the idea that negritude thought has outlived its role, asserting its importance to black literature on a global scale, its significance as a set of cultural, philosophical, and literary concerns that remain debated today, and its relevance to intellectual history and to anyone committed to Africa and the diaspora. Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Alioune Diop, and Leon-Gontran Damas remain the most famous names. The intellectual branch of twentieth-century pan-Africanism since the twenties and thirties, when the movement coalesced in Parisian Francophone and Caribbean intellectual circles, negritude was harshly criticized as a form of reverse racism by Nkosi's countryman Ezekiel Mphahlele in The Image (1962). Denounced by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Remy Medou Mvomo, and WoIe Soyinka, the movement suffered a resounding blow at literary conferences in Dakar and Freetown in 1963 when it was dismissed by many other great writers, among them Tchicaya U Tam'si and Ousmane Sembene, who proclaimed it outmoded and superfluous. …