DUSK AT DAWN: ELEGY FOR THE MYSTERY COCKS

(Modern African Literature and the Making of its Classics)

Osita Ezeliora

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Abstract:

In a 1999 essay titled ‘The Role of the Heinemann African Writers Series in the Development and Promotion of African Literature’, which was published in African Studies, 58.1(1999): 105-122, the South African writer, Phaswane Mpe, made some disturbing proclamations concerning the identity and authenticity of Modern African literature. Among other things, Mpe argues that even though the publishing outfit has contributed to the promotion of African literature, the privileging of the earlier writers of the AWS, especially Chinua Achebe and other West and East African writers is a function of ‘a politics’ that emanates from the Founding/General editors selecting the manuscripts of ‘their college friends and colleagues’ over other writers. While recognizing commercialism as an essential determinant in the choice of publishers, Mpe makes the claim that scholars have wrongly looked at Achebe and his contemporaries of the AWS fame as “(grand)parents!” of African literature since, according to him, writers like Sol Plaatje and A.C. Jordan had since “translated” African indigenous expressive forms and nuances which are often cited as demonstrations of African culture and speech forms. He makes the additional claim that since the question of who is an African is still contestable, so also is the discipline of ‘African Literature’.

 Phaswane Mpe died in December 2004, and barely a month after, K. Sello Duiker, another young South African writer also died, in January 2005. While Mpe had a published novel, Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001), and a few academic essays before his death, K. Sello Duiker had two published novels, Thirteen Cents (2000), and The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001). Both writers, I believe, were haunted by the demon of uncertainty in their sense of individuation and Africanness. While I would have preferred the title, ‘Modern African literature and the Making of its Classics’ as a way of responding to Mpe’s late entry into the debate on Africanity, I have only retained it as a subtitle, while adopting the elegiac form, ‘Dusk at dawn: Elegy for the Mystery Cocks’, so as to enable me kill two birds with a stone: a reading of the works of both authors on the one segment, and to establish that there is not only an African literature, but also African people whose identity as Africans are not contestable. The earlier sections of this essay will, therefore, examine the work and contribution of K. Sello Duiker and Phaswane Mpe as ‘emergent’ black South African writers after apartheid, while the later segments shall address the question of African literary classicism and its making. The problematic of Africanity, it is likely to be observed, is more of a South African problem. I shall argue that the white South African, in the liberalism of the new order, needs a sense of Africanity and Africanness. For after all, a man who went to bed yesterday as ‘European’ only to wake up the next morning as ‘African’ certainly needs African literature and culture to assert his new sense of Africanity. But the black South African writer needs to transcend narratives of the city; and the challenge is as much to the academy as it is to the governments of African countries to promote a cultural renaissance that will instill in their subjects a sense of pride in what is truly African.