Okoampah-Ahoofe Titillates Our Intellectual Curiosity

Sure, it wasn’t the first time celebrated novelist Chinua Achebe had refused to accept an honorary award. And Prof Kwame Okoampah-Ahoofe puts it most succinctly in his title to an article on the subject, which appeared on Ghanaweb.com on December 7, 2011: “Achebe merely repeated his perennial political statement”. In that brilliant account, Kwame also refers to his experience in 1989, when he sat under the distinguished lectureship of the Things Fall Apart author, Professor Achebe, who had visited the City University of New York as an African scholar. Particularly, and what is of interest to us in this issue, Kwame recounts how Prof Achebe’s visit had caused “the utter displeasure of quite a slew of inward-looking white-American professors, many of whom seemed not to know what to make of the academic concept of African Literature.”

I had since Esi Edugyan, a Canadian writer (she insists she is Canadian through and through, and indeed, seeks to distance her West-African roots from her very person) won the Giller in Canada, I had been pondering on the currency of African literature in western literary scholarship. We were all very happy when a young lady with a Ghanaian name was shortlisted for the Man Booker. Esi didn’t win the Booker. But of course, Ben Okri did us proud not too long ago. And Chimamanda’s Orange is forever a joy.

So, perhaps, it was most fitting that President John Evans Atta-Mills, on a working visit to Canada, would celebrate young Edugyan when he met the Ghanaian community in Ottawa at the Amphitheatre of the St Paul’s University. The Ghanaian president did not mention Esi’s award among other subjects; it was the first item on the president’s subject list when he started his speech. So, it came as a stab in the nationalistic nerves of some of us when Esi Edugyan, when asked by the CBC’s Carol Off on her As It Happens show, about her African connection, would ask why people are quick to associate her with West Africa because of her looks. She was emphatic: “I am Canadian through and through.”

Anyhow, this issue is not about Edugyan. Neither is it about whether she wants to be Ghanaian or African or none. We want to explore what Western scholars make of African literature, as Kwame pointed out. And we are not also suggesting that Edugyan sought to distance herself from West Africa because she, as a Canadian born-American-and-Canadian-educated person, deemed African literature not good enough.

For, there are other great African writers, some international award winners, who would rather opt for a voluntary life prison term than to wish away their African heritage for all the gold in the world. It is forever worth mentioning that Soyinka (he may not be a Shakespeare) stands very tall among the greatest writers literature has seen since the invention of printing. And of course, Achebe is scholarship made flesh. There are a few others who have done us proud, both locally and internationally. But it makes sense, especially in an age of globalisation (never mind whether the concept itself is not a joke, when conditions and conditionalities for British and American loans have shifted from forced structural adjustment programmes to tolerance of Gay and Lesbian marriages) to know how African literature is perceived in western academic circles.

A few years ago, Nick Griffin, a racist supporter of the British national party in Britain, asked if there was ever a black equivalent of Mozart or Shakespeare. The insult by pioneer DNA scientist and Nobel Prize winner, James Watson, is still fresh on our minds. James had said that he had observed blacks for a long time and concluded that they don’t have the intellectual capacity for great ideas. Watson had spoken the minds of a greater population of academics in western universities who have the same suspicions Professor Okoampah-Ahoofe spoke about. Does the concept of African literature mean anything beyond suspicions of bad grammar, shallow creativity and weak subject matter?

Right here on this forum, I told how an American professor sought to make nonsense of everything Ghanaweb in a mail he wrote to me. He said he had been reading most of the articles and news stories on the site, and had found that the standards–both in English composition and discussion of subject matter, were generally low. He had said I was not an exception, but he had chosen to contact me because he believed I could tell my people about the urgent need to read more to improve on our writing. Well, I wasn’t going to be a chicken. I carefully analysed his email, painstakingly applying the rules of basic grammar, register, collocation, and even good-old subject-verb-agreement, to edit his sentences and every word. I also did not forget to refer to the rules on mechanical accuracy and syntax. I wrote back to the white American professor, pointing out the mistakes in his own writing. I, in fact, recast some of his sentences, moving punctuations and changing passive verbs into active ones for reasons of parallelism. In the end, I recommended E.B White’s Elements of Writing for the sociology professor.

As if God is not King in Israel, the American academic wrote a very sorry apology to me, pleading that he was not an accomplished writer by any measure. Chickening out like the turkeys fellow American Maury Maverick refers to in gobbledegook (he coined the word gobbledegook from the sound of turkeys in his backyard on May 21 1944) my sociology professor friend also wrote that he is so unsure of his grammar that whenever he writes his papers, he is quick to submit them to his colleagues for review. There, I said Otwea. Nobody killed Antwi. The American never suspected that all along I was doing shakara. But it all paid off so well that he offered to remain a friend to me. He sent several emails and I didn’t reply any. I don’t take ‘fanful’ respect from people who are full of themselves.

I haven’t taught in a university community before, so I would not pretend to know exactly how African academics are received and assessed. However, I have heard stories from friends who are teaching at universities in the west. Your own colleagues look at you with some suspicion, sometimes pronouncing their doubts with the disdain of Senator Brabantio in Coriolanus. Students have the liberty to write you up. You can’t write them up. Yours is to teach them. Theirs is to be taught. But beyond that, their grading counts in your retention as lecturer. My friend in Atlanta pronounced ‘water’ with his thick Techiman accent, such that it sounded like the ninth wonder of the world or anything close to a dinosaur. His students reported that they could not hear a thing the new African teacher says, whereupon he was asked to go take basic language courses with Korean and Russian immigrant kids. There, you learn to say ‘warer,’ not water. But his fufu tongue was too thick to let water roll over as ‘warer. So, he abandoned teaching all together to drive Lorries, which pays better.

And, just by the way, how quality is African literature, anyway? My professor friends are impatient to submit: “Over here, they make you work for the money.” They necessarily need to make a presence in academic journals and research into new things, to keep their post. Some of them find it a chore and an unhealthy demand on their time. Their compatriots back in their home countries do not have to produce anything to keep their forever guaranteed tenures. The words of their students would never prevail over theirs. They devote quality time to their private businesses, fitting their university duties in their business plan. In the end, the job gets done alright because somebody got paid. What about scholarship? It seems to belong somewhere. Does it explain why we cross continents to find knowledge when we have accomplished scholars breathing down our nose?

Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin is a journalist. He works in partner relations and outreach management in Ottawa, Canada.

Email: bigfrontiers@gmail.com