INTERVIEW: Decolonising African literature: Ngugi is right, but… – Olu Obafemi

The literary scholar in this interview justified his action, which goes against the grain of a new movement promoted by renowned Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo that Africans should write in their Indigenous languages and discard English and other languages of their erstwhile European colonisers.

Olu Obafemi, a distinguished professor of English language and dramatic literature, is a prominent figure in the African literary landscape with many contributions and achievements.

As the former National President of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA) and a National Merit Award Winner, his influence extends far beyond his prolific works in English. His decision to translate D.O. Fagunwa’s Adiitu (The Mysteries of God), one of the earliest African novels written in Yoruba, into English is a testament to his dedication to preserving African literary heritage.

The literary scholar in this interview justified his action, which goes against the grain of a new movement promoted by renowned Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiongo. This movement advocates that Africans should write in their Indigenous languages and discard English and other languages of their erstwhile European colonisers.

Professor Obafemi agrees that moving in this direction is essential to enable Africans to assert their cultural identity and also free themselves from the chokehold influence that has held down the continent’s development for too long.

However, for their sake and that of their societies, it’s inevitable for writers to expand, export, and share their cultural milieu’s ethos, beauty, world views, and experiences with other peoples. And through what media other than foreign languages? Mr Obafemi, whose literary works are often heavily culturally nuanced, argues. He spoke more on this and other issues.

Excerpts:

Yinka: Your translation of D.H. Fagunwa’s Adiitu (The Mysteries of God), one of Yoruba’s classics, is it to disagree with the new thinking for more writings in African indigenous languages and thus decolonisation of the African mind being championed by Ngugi wa Thiong’o?

Prof Obafemi: Many years ago, the late Edward Jones, in his book on Wole Soyinka, said, WS our WS, that’s Wole Soyinka our William Shakespeare, and I said, what is that? Must Soyinka’s genius be compared and made subservient to Shakespeare’s?

Wole Soyinka is in a different cultural milieu. So, it’s Wole Soyinka, our Wole Soyinka, not Wole Soyinka, our William Shakespeare… we have a history, a history of cultural genocide. The white man came and knew that if you conquer somebody’s language, you conquer their civilisation. They knew that if you make a man appear cultureless, you’ve dehumanised him; you’ve hit the core of his life. So, what they did to us was to offer us their language and try to kill our own to perceive the world from their perspective.

It was a complete hegemony, not just an economic conquest but a cultural conquest that continued long after colonialism. In other words, I understand where Ngugi is coming from. However, he has agreed to translate his works from English to Yoruba because he sees the essence of readership. If you write in your language, only Kikuyu people can read it—a tiny population even in Kenya, not to mention Africa.

I attempted to translate Fagunwa because I had read Fagunwa in primary school, primary four and five, and that’s where we were introduced to such complex works. The quality of the language, the depth of thought, the capture of the whole essence of a people, their flora, their fauna, their vegetation, their landscape, their humanity, their animals and their mythology, the search for moderation, which formed part and parcel of the context of Yoruba culture so other people should read it. Despite the large Yoruba population, I’ve always felt the audience needs expanded. However, regarding comprehension, the Yoruba population outside of Nigeria has gradually reduced. So, after reading Soyinka’s translation of a sister work, ‘Ogboju Ode Ninu Igbo Irunmole’, ‘In the Forest of A Thousand Demons’, I felt I should do the same with the book that, I thought, most captured Fagunwa, Adiitu. Not just because of the dream sequences but because of the morals of that work. It’s no wonder that it’s his last work. He sometimes compares himself with the Christian world but returns to establish Yoruba morality. I thought other people must read this work. And I never had the time to do it.

I was sad until I got this invitation for a five-month visiting professorship at South Western University, where I was given only two courses. So, I had only four hours a week. Plus, of course, I am working on producing my play. But I had a vast expanse, quote-unquote, of time-space. I sat down… Ah! It’s an enormous amount of work. I asked, “Are you going to do translation? Are you going to do transliteration? Are you going to use direct equivalence?” There was a whole week that I struggled with one sentence, just one sentence. There are days that I would translate two or three pages, but I would go back and destroy it and begin again. For me, it is my answer to the question of language.

Not all of us writers can write in our language because of the kind of background that we have now, and I do not want to deceive myself by saying all the dramas and all the plays; I can write them in Yoruba, even if I mix my dialect. Let us be honest with ourselves. But I know enough of my culture to project it even in English.

That’s why you find that I use songs, phrases, and so on in the work. And that’s why (Chinua) Achebe said that he takes the English language and deploys it to the cultural office. How he did his own is incredible, even till tomorrow. So, we have our various approaches, but let us not deceive ourselves into saying that we can all write in our language, given our kind of foundation. I didn’t study Yoruba in school. There was even no Yoruba in the school I attended as a subject. All of this developed later. Even those who followed later, the Akinwunmi Isolas, studied English and then went and did a Masters in Yoruba. None of them studied Yoruba for their B.A. because it wasn’t there. Even Baba (Prof Ayo) Bangbose.

Yinka: Your writings tend to portray you as a gadfly serving the interest of the under-served. But how much of the Nigerian poor class can you appreciate and empathise with their condition with the visible passion in your works?

Prof Obafemi: I am instinctively committed to advocating social justice, equality, and equity. It wasn’t clear to me at the start. I was just doing it instinctively. I was defending things just like that. Even when we got to the university, no ideology guided what I was doing, but I started studying Socialism and Marxism. I had a significant encounter in Leeds when I joined this Marxist group under cultural studies. But to answer your question, I grew up in a rural society and was part of the masquerade motifs and performances.

Meanwhile, my father had taken exception to that, though he started first with that. Then, his father became a Muslim, and my father also had to be named Buraimo. He got an Islamic name, Buraimo, and then turned around totally to Christianity to be a core founder of the church. His business was farming and tailoring. My mother was a food hawker. The whole environment was on agrarian subsistence. So, how could I forget that? I know that my father had to sell a portion of his farm to pay my first fees in the school. In the college I attended, every time you came first in your class, your school fees would be paid, so I was first throughout. So, apart from that first time my father paid my school fees, he never had to pay any fees for me again. They were supposed to refund the one he paid before. So, how could I forget that I grew from the grassroots, from a rustic topography and cosmology? I only watched television once I got to the HSC class.

There was this rediffusion thing in colonial days. How could I suddenly think that I’m part of the rich people? Which richness? From where? Defrauding the country and calling it wealth? In the society I grew up in, if you stole anything and you were caught, the punishment was enormous. In the farms, if you find a pineapple or banana tree, you cut the fruit, put it on the rock, and cover it for the owner.

The person comes the next day to take it. Stealing was an anathema. It was abhorred. Coming from that kind of background, unless one is suffering from cultural amnesia and has lost his roots, you cannot but be concerned about the poor, the underfed, and the unemployed. They are all tied to this fight against inequality because many of those called rich did nothing to acquire that wealth, at least legitimately. It is in that sense that my attack on corruption was instant.

The enlistment of one’s commitment to the underprivileged was instant, and the search for social reconstruction derives from that – that is, if you say this is not good, what do you put in its place? We indeed started from the leftist perspective. We couldn’t change because we are in a crude capitalist structure, and our attempt did not gain political force or muscle. In any case, as we tried, we found that we were cut down, and the system itself became deeply entrenched in the capitalist mode of production, a crude type because it was a consumerist rather than a productive kind.

But that was the thing that we set out to fight – corruption, to fight disadvantage, to struggle for equality, for equity and justice; that’s why we committed our work to the struggle. One of Osofisan’s plays was ‘Once Upon Four Robbers’; the attempt was not to praise banditry but to use the knowledge for reconstruction. So, when you read some of my works, you find that what I’m doing is to say, ’How do we use history? How do we use culture?’ It is not to revere or worship them but to deconstruct them and make them contribute to national reconstruction and revolution.

Yinka: Your lectern style is similar to Professors Femi Osofisan, Niyi Osundare and the late Akinwumi Isola’s – culturally rooted, engaging and perfomatory. Much of this is missing in public speaking practice among intellectuals and public office holders – a reason, perhaps, they sound rather dull, trite, monotonous and ineffective, unlike the American public speaking traditions, which, despite its glamour, lacks the elaborate artistic flavour. How do you help the situation?

Prof Obafemi: To be an effective public speaker, you must dip your speech into the waters of performance. Suppose you are talking about American culture now. In that case, the reason why that can happen in America and may not happen in London is because multi-racialism also brings in many other cultures.

Look at even this woman, Kamala Harris. She knows how to move the people – “We must move, we must move…” I thought I was in Nigeria. The people move because you understand the consciousness of the people. How much more than we in Nigeria, whose life is rooted in storytelling, its technique, its various benefits, the interactional nature, the performative nature, the storytelling setting of communal involvement, and communal participation in which everybody is involved?

When I went to Leeds and was staging my first play, The Knights of the Mystical Beast, I went to the workshop there, and I said I needed a few students or staff interested in African plays. Most of them didn’t know what an African play was, but they were excited, they were enthusiastic, and if you saw the kind of change that brought to the theatre workshop apart from teaching them the songs, teaching them the dance, even getting some of them to drum, they were excited.

They all stood up; everybody stood up. We need to debunk and disorient our Western cultural speech performance of communication. We should return to our original setting of an empathetic involvement in the production process.

Yinka: Despite your being a cosmopolitan writer-scholar, you often give your works a native touch and Indigenous appeal, mainly when they concern your homeland, Kiriland. Why the compulsive focus on and celebration of this upland community?

Prof Obafemi: Because it’s cut off, even physically, because the roads are bad during the rainy season, you cannot access the place, and there is no government presence. Don’t let me go into the details of that. It needed all the attention possible. It is not just being provincial; It’s not just being ethnicised; it is also calling attention to neglected people. So, there’s also an ideological base for that.

In any case, I have always said that the first place to change is the one you know, and you are ethnic before you are national. If you want to be a patriot or be nationalistic, you must not do it out of context. If you haven’t read Niyi Osundare’s poetry, you know little about Ekiti, Ikere Ekiti, and its natural roots. You use that essential background to project a universal image. All truths are universal in that when we say, ‘Do not kill’ in your village, it’s also told in America.

The punishments may be different. ’Do not steal…’ I said the environment where I came from stealing is abhorrent. It’s criminal. You are ostracised. So, if I see a corrupt politician and look at my village, this is not what we used to do. This is not how we used to treat our Nigerian society. So, you are, first of all, a writer from a background before you become a macro-essential writer.

The aesthetic is not even the most important, but more so is the structuring, the context of beauty, and the ability to capture the audience first of all and sustain it. That’s what aesthetics is all about. If we are doing the masquerade thing, everybody, even the child behind the mother, is participating – the communalist essence. If your drama must survive in the modern psyche, it must attain the performative character.