What is the nationality of your idiom? : African literature and the language-between

Abstract

The 'Language Question' is as old as modern African literature itself. As far as I know, no major academic conference has taken place in the past 50 years without devoting some time and space to the problem of the African writer's choice of the language of literary expression. This is hardly surprising, considering the primacy of language as an instrument of culture and its utter indispensability as the enabler of literature. There is also something close to what one may call the 'African anomaly': the unconscionable dominance of 'foreign' languages and consequent marginalization of the indigenous; the political instrumentality of 'foreign' languages in the construction of modern nation states, and their linguistic input in the degree of nation-ness of these states; the fact that even so many years after the end of formal colonization, many parts of Africa are still called by the names derived from the imperial languages used within their borders ('Anglophone', Francophone', 'Lusophone', etc); the fact that the bulk of the continent's literary output known to the outside world is written in languages other than those indigenous to it.... Naturally, this 'anomaly' has generated a diversity of attitudes, viewpoints, and opinions, ranging from the conservative ('nothing wrong with foreign languages') to the radical ('indigenous languages now'). African literature inhabits the space between these two extremes. This paper seeks to explore the linguistic and cultural pressures on African writing, the complexly diglossic ambiance of its creation, and the modes and methods it has adopted for negotiating/navigating the grey but fertile space between imported languages and indigenous tongues. It will draw on my personal experiences as a bilingual and bicultural writer.