Africa and the Literature of Unfreedom

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INTRODUCTION

When I grow up I’d like to be a dog... (A little girl in a Warsaw Ghetto)

The muse as endangered specie

In their book, Extreme Situations. ■.. David Craig and Michael Egan write, detailing the behavior of literature in the interwar years: “In the ghetto in Warsaw in 1914, Ludwik Hirszfeld asked a little girl, ‘What would you like to be.’ She answered, ‘A dog, because the sentries like dogs’.” Literature continues to recount and transform experiences, such as has been described above. No doubt, literature has over the ages been constantly affronted, largely because it stokes the imagination. Imagination continues to serve as a cipher for a universal language; and, in a way, it is not particularly surprising that workers of the imaginative enterprise have also had to contend, simultaneously, with a universal language of applause and censorship. Long before the age of writing, our forebears found allies in other genres for creative expressivity. For instance, by playing the codifier, through speech surrogacy, music became a viable nest for treasured information, and hidden critique. The early jester, “remembrancer” and court poet all comingled, yet finding a little space to get at the Genre. Even great minds in history will eventually want the poet banned from the Republic; and over the period, they did get banned, even harmed in ways too shameful to recount to contemporary civilization. And it was not a habit contained by the diversity of our geographies ... just wherever power relations felt threatened sufficiently enough. And the infamous apartheid system of South Africa was yet one such case in point.

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Africa and the Literature of Unfreedom

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