Africa has been colonised by France, Spain, Portugal, England and America with the result that there was gross exploitation of the people who were in this process. They were deprived of education, their sole dignity and integrity and at heart their morale and decency.
The point is that I am writing as a woman, as a writer, as a poet and as an African. I am writing as a representative of Africa. Some of you might say what has my gender got to do with it. But for years, even now, women have been second class citizens in Africa. They have been denied human rights and a voice to speak out against the brutal injustices and abuses that have fallen against them.
Africa has been drained dry by the exploitation and the violation of its natural reserves of gold and diamonds and all its mineral resources. This affected the standard of education and the level of literacy on the continent for generations.
For this reason there has been a scourge of good writers and poets coming out of Africa. This has been particularly so in my own country, South Africa, which only fifteen years ago gained its independence and threw off the yoke of Apartheid, with it the Group Areas Act, the humiliating forced removals which meant that people were smothered into tiny two-roomed homes with their families which made it difficult to raise their children to be upstanding, law-abiding citizens.
Although many changes have to be made, the change after 350 years of oppression, discrimination and prejudice has brought about a novel, unique, relevant and compelling freedom which brought to light the injustices of the past government’s patriarchal system.
Many South African writers whose literary ‘voice’ and ability were stifled now can write freely without any censorship, detention, torture or banning order about the different cultures, languages, faiths, mores and the racial boundaries that existed before.
No more will the words ‘kinky’, ‘nappy’ hair, ‘kroeskop’, ‘Bushy’ be used as expletives; as curses. No longer will they be known as vile and mocking the pedigree or breed of a person.
As a South African writer, I write from the point of view of a black South African whose parents experienced and grew up in the struggle. Who for half of their life experience battled through to obtain a suitable level of education. They grew up in difficult, turbulent, trying times. They were deprived of an adequate education and thus could only qualify to do menial jobs or become nurses or teachers.
My grandmother worked as a domestic servant for a white family and my paternal grandfather worked as a barman at an elite country club for White golfers and their posh wives and bratty, spoilt children. She was treated in a demeaning fashion and nothing more as a servant or a nanny. However, my parents were prepared to see their children get the best possible education under the circumstances which was putrid to the extreme.
I grew up surrounded by books with a love of reading instilled in me by both of my parents who became teachers. The attitudes that the Whites had against Blacks were abhorrent. They were of another breed of people. They looked down on the lower classes and saw them as being a sad, pathetic species that they had either an obligation towards, or they remained aloof, indifferent towards or whom at best they tolerated with disdain.
Now is the time for African writers to write with a passion, in overdrive, to write what they like with their own personal signature style and to not be afraid of breaking the mould, breaking new ground with humility, with the milk of human kindness and tenderness that was so lacking in their White contemporaries who could only show hate, self-hate, a deep lack of self-respect, treachery and wickedness; the ones who upheld that unholy law of the division of all the races in South Africa.
Yet it is still not so different – other countries on the continent are not as free or do not experience freedom in the sense or the way we do in South Africa – in other African nations on this beautiful, diverse, vibrant, cosmopolitan continent filled with communities that are filled with joy, life, love, colour and laughter despite their devastating poverty stricken, marginalised and disadvantaged status quo; they are trapped in white hot war zones or the trembling precipice of peaceful reforms and democratic elections and the election of the first female president ever of an African country.
Their voices are quelled. Their histories are quelled as is their individual pain, the innocence of their children, their sorrow and suffering for all the world to see in light but it is invisible in the darkness of their sadness, helplessness and their hopelessness for the situations that they find themselves in.
The nursery of any writer is school, literacy and education from a young age. Yet schools are still divided. There are schools for the rich and schools for the poor. There are writers and poets for the rich and writers and poets for the poor. There are writers for God’s children knocking on every conceivable door in this day and age. Orphans, children growing up in poverty; weak, innocent, malnourished, abandoned and neglected.
Yet one cannot look past the fact that service delivery has become a moot point. The television brings across daily many disturbances where people are dissatisfied that they do not have clean running water, electricity and sanitation. There are still disruptions in normal living in the townships that have sprung up and flourished across the country in South Africa.
I for one would like to see more African writers addressing human rights, social awareness and change, wars, coups, revolutionaries in their poetry and their writing instead of shying away from their responsibility and not accepting the platform that they have been given for their voices to be heard.
The difficulties facing the African writer today is that there are still White professors, educators, teachers that foster the culture of the colonial past. Very few Blacks hold high positions in management, in tertiary institutions which nullifies Blacks from being motivated to write about the past. Much of the history is written from a White perspective and makes it so much more difficult for African writers to articulate and write profusely in their mother tongue about their past.
African writers now more than ever, must take up the mantle of responsibility and accountability, must nurture an unbreakable and sustainable paradigm shift throughout sub-Saharan Africa and the continent in its entirety for Africa to succeed, to bridge the divide; the gap, to build successes from their progeny.
Sufi poet Amir Khusrau said, ‘People think they are alive because they have soul in them, but I am alive because I have love in myself.’ I want the children on the African continent, globally and from different nationalities, to realise that expression of their inimitable talent or gift, that expression of their creativity – that is gold and that all men are born equal second to none.
Man will reach such a level of perfection through education, writing, literacy, through learning, that he will only see God (everywhere), despite the undeniable reality of the brokenness and heartache and wrongdoing of humankind that exists daily on the African continent.
African intellectuals and writers more importantly must not be led by blind faith. We must rebuild and mend the fences of the decline of the empire. Let the ego dissolve and write with a wholehearted passion, commitment and dedication to TRUTH.
We must never let the murmuring intellect cease nor diminish. Intellectuals and writers must no longer declare a rigid doctrine or philosophy for this generation or the next. They must challenge each generation to be unique freethinkers.
We, the ones of God-fearing nations have long realised that it is the love of God that manifests itself in the love of humankind and as our history is being rewritten daily. It is being rewritten in blood, through tears and perspiration through the annals of time. In the corruption of our leaders, the politicians we voted into government. We rant, we strike, we march, we toy-toy, we protest. Alas, it all falls on deaf ears. There is no temple of delight where we feel emotionally and financially stable and secure. We go home on strange highways. We go on like beasts, red devils on wild Saturdays breathing in the vitriol, bucolic air, the stench of capitalism, of liquor and of the West.
It is new radicals and rebels with cause who delight in issues prevalent to present day society, that deploy knowledge and principles through administration, legislature, government and literature, poetry, performance and through word.
The words signal a messianic calling to the writer, fundi, linguist, intellectual, sociologist, the cultural anthropologist, and scientist. In the realm of writing as in dreams there are no boundaries. There are no limits.
It is difficult to be a Black writer in South Africa today and to get your work published. It is difficult to get bursaries and funding for printing and for publishing the work. All the publishing houses are still in the hands of the White minority. Publishing your work becomes a gigantic, a mammoth task that lies ahead of you.
There is a great need for Afro-centric publishing houses to fill the need of publishing the work of the African writer. I am amazed at the vibrancy and the quality of the work that has come out of African writers which should motivate each and every African to tell his or her story.
Books have always been the friends of a wounded heart. The libraries and the museums have all this time been English orientated. They have been made unavailable to people whose second language is English and scant if any regard has been given to the history of the indigenous people of Africa.
There is no misrepresenting the decline of recording authentic literature and the decline of civilisation, as we know it in Africa from urban decay. We mustn’t eclipse the divine vision from our inimitable foresight.
However pious, charitable, virtuous or learned we may be at this door, we must not let our own dogmas and philosophies eclipse the divine vision from what we want and what we need from our sight.
I want the ink on the page to be like the rivers of time and to keep on flowing ceaselessly. Writers are seekers; miracle workers, as they always have been through the ages of time. There remain histories to be written and we must never lose sight of that.