Below is Ikhide R Ikheloa’s writing on Facebook regarding Wole Soyinka’s comment on Labour Party’s 2023 election:
Much of what passes for African literature has failed Africa, to be honest. Or to put it another way, the expectation that African writers would be the voice, the conscience of Africa, is today, misplaced.
To be fair that expectation is self-imposed. The writer who accepts prizes, grants and support dedicated exclusively to African writers and African writing is accepting a pedestal that is unsustainable and unrealistic.
The writer who gets up and speaks as if Africa is a country is enabling a dysfunction. What does it mean to be an African? What does it mean to be a Nigerian? And how does your reality speak for mine?
These questions surface because of the bewildering silence of African (star) writers in matters affecting black African nations. From South Africa, to Nigeria, often in the name of “democracy”, we are witnessing horrid oppression of the people, especially the poor, injustice that rivals the horrors of apartheid and colonialism.
We hear nothing from our writers unless it is for pay (in their books). They are quick to attend rallies against First World Injustice (Trump, identity politics, white police brutality, blah blah blah) and sign well written communiques lambasting horrors in the West, along with western writers.
You will not see their names in any petition against say Buratai and El Rufai showing shock at the mass murder of 1,000 Nigerians who were hurriedly buried in mass graves. If any one of those was a (White) American they will go and carry aso ebi tee shirt. They have been AWOL or singing from both sides of their multiple mouths with respect to the farce playing out in Nigeria. The Soyinka that allegedly tore up his green card over Trump’s excesses is gaslighting Nigerian youths in a blatantly disrespectful way of defending the outrageous desecration of the highest office of the land by his friend Tinubu and the APC. It is not well in Nigeria.
On the one hand, given the expectation of their role and purpose, this is disheartening. We must come to the reality, that the African writer is just telling his or her own story, with little or no interest in creating a space warmer than his or her own. They are just being human. And that is fine.
What they are creating is not African writing. They are Africans creating literature for themselves and a paying audience. Like their Western peers who do not have the. burden of unrealistic expectation heaped on them. This is as it should be. They are writers, telling their own (self-serving?) stories.
The term “African writer” has a noble historical basis, but today it is just a shtick that buys the chicken nuggets. Fair enough. The era of unrealistic expectations is over. Bin the pretense, we are each on our own. It is what it is.
Ikheloa writes from Maryland, USA.
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