I really encourage everyone to post a brief bio of an author they enjoy or admire.
The idea is to post a brief Bio about the author and list some of their books and a brief blurb about their audience or style.

Please, this is your opportunity to talk up an author you like - established or emerging. Let's give African and African American authors a much needed place (if only a modest one) to shine and spread the word !!

I will also post author bios who may not be African or AA but who IMHO have something of value to offer their readers.

If YOU are an author - jump in!! Tell us who you are and what you are/have written about - poet and spoken word artists' Bios are welcome too!

Don't be shy... just hit Reply...

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FireFly,

MELCHIOR D. FERNANDES

As a young boy, East Timorese arts, musician, writer Fernandes lived dangerously through the last years of the Indonesian regime. More recently, he has been working with East Timor's free arts school, Arte Moris, and composing music for the theatre company Bibi Bulak. He lives in Jakarta. He is one of the writers involved in the construction of the nation of East Timor.

HENRY REYNOLDS

Henry Reynolds is one of Australia's most influential historians, having written widely on the Aboriginal reaction to the white invasion and the relationship between white and black cultures.

He is the author of 14 books including An Indelible Stain, Nowhere People, Fate of a Free People and the award-winning Why Weren't We Told? (the truth about our Indigenous history).

HAIFA ZANGANA

A painter and writer who grew up in Iraq. She was impresioned by the Ba'ath regime in 1971-72, and has lived in London since 1976.

Zangana is a frequent contributor to newspapers, and lectures regularly on Iraqi culture, literature and women's issues. She has written short stories, novels, including Women on a Journey and is a contributor to the recently published Not One More Death, a condemnation of the war in Iraq.

MAYA ANGELOU

Born Marguerite Johnson on April 4 in St. Louis, Missouri.

Maya Angelou is one of the great voices of contemporary literature. She is a poet, educator, historian, best-selling author, actress, playwright, civil-rights activist, producer and director.
The first of her 12 books, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings was publshed in 1970. Her other books include:
The Heart of A Woman, All God's Children Need Travelling Shoes, A Song Flung Up to Heaven, Gather Together in My Name, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, Even the Stars Look Lonesome, I Shall Not Be Moved, Crowns: Portraits of Black Women in Church Hats (by Michael Cunningham, Craig Marberry, Maya Angelou), Phenomenal Woman.

Maya's Bio: http://www.nwhp.org/tlp/biographies/angelou/angelou_bio.html

WOLE SOYINKA

Born on 13 July 1934 at Abeokuta, near Ibadan in western Nigeria. After preparatory university studies in 1954 at Government College in Ibadan, he continued at the University of Leeds, where, later, in 1973, he took his doctorate. During the six years spent in England, he was a dramaturgist at the Royal Court Theatre in London 1958-1959. In 1960, he was awarded a Rockefeller bursary and returned to Nigeria to study African drama. At the same time, he taught drama and literature at various universities in Ibadan, Lagos, and Ife, where, since 1975, he has been professor of comparative literature. In 1960, he founded the theatre group, "The 1960 Masks" and in 1964, the "Orisun Theatre Company", in which he has produced his own plays and taken part as actor. He has periodically been visiting professor at the universities of Cambridge, Sheffield, and Yale.

During the civil war in Nigeria, Soyinka appealed in an article for cease-fire. For this he was arrested in 1967, accused of conspiring with the Biafra rebels, and was held as a political prisoner for 22 months untill 1969. Soyinka has published about 20 works: drama, novels and poetry. He writes in English and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words.

As dramatist, Soyinka has been influenced by, among others, the Irish writer, J.M. Synge, but links up with the traditional popular African theatre with its combination of dance, music, and action. He bases his writing on the mythology of his own tribe-the Yoruba-with Ogun, the god of iron and war, at the centre. He wrote his first plays during his time in London, The Swamp Dwellers and The Lion and the Jewel (a light comedy), which were performed at Ibadan in 1958 and 1959 and were published in 1963. Later, satirical comedies are The Trial of Brother Jero (publ. 1963) with its sequel, Jero's Metamorphosis (publ. 1973), A Dance of the Forests (publ.1963), Kongi's Harvest (publ. 1967) and Madmen and Specialists (publ. 1971). Among Soyinka's serious philosophic plays are (apart from "The Swamp Dwellers") The Strong Breed (publ. 1963), The Road (1965) and Death and the King's Horseman (publ. 1975). In The Bacchae of Euripides (1973), he has rewritten the Bacchae for the African stage and in Opera Wonyosi (publ. 1981), bases himself on John Gay's Beggar's Opera and Brecht's The Threepenny Opera. Soyinka's latest dramatic works are A Play of Giants (1984) and Requiem for a Futurologist (1985).

Soyinka has written two novels, The Interpreters (1965), narratively, a complicated work which has been compared to Joyce's and Faulkner's, in which six Nigerian intellectuals discuss and interpret their African experiences, and Season of Anomy (1973) which is based on the writer's thoughts during his imprisonment and confronts the Orpheus and Euridice myth with the mythology of the Yoruba.

Purely autobiographical are The Man Died: Prison Notes (1972) and the account of his childhood, Aké (1981), in which the parents' warmth and interest in their son are prominent. Literary essays are collected in, among others, Myth, Literature and the African World (1975).

Soyinka's poems, which show a close connection to his plays, are collected in Idanre, and Other Poems, Poems from Prison, A Shuttle in the Crypt, the long poem Ogun Abibimanand Mandela's Earth and Other Poems.
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ALBERT CHINUALUMOGU ACHEBE was born the son of Isaiah Okafo, a Christian churchman, and Janet N. Achebe November 16, 1930 in Ogidi, Nigeria. He married Christie Chinwe Okoli, September 10, 1961, and now has four children: Chinelo, Ikechukwu, Chidi, and Nwando. He attended Government College in Umuahia from 1944 to 1947 and University College in Ibadan from 1948 to 1953. He then received a B.A. from London University in 1953 and studied broadcasting at the British Broadcasting Corp. in London in 1956.

Since the 1950's, Nigeria has witnessed "the flourishing of a new literature which has drawn sustanence from both traditional oral literature and from the present and rapidly changing society," writes Margaret Laurence in her book Long Drums and Cannons: Nigerian Dramatists and Novelists. Thirty years ago Chinua Achebe was one of the founders of this new literature, and over the years many critics have come to consider him the finest of the Nigerian novelists. His acheivement, however, has not been limited to his continent. He is considered by many to be one of the best novelists now writing in the English language.

Unlike some African writers struggling for acceptance among contemporary English-language novelists, Achebe has been able to avoid imitating the trends in English literature. Rejecting the European notion "that art should be accountable to no one, and [needs] to justify itself to nobody," as he puts it in his book of essays, Morning Yet on Creation Day, Achebe has embraced instead the idea at the heart of the African oral tradition: that "art is, and always was, at the service of man. Our ancestors created their myths and told their stories for a human purpose." For this reason, Achebe beleives that "any good story, any good novel, should have a message, should have a purpose."

Achebe's feel for the African context has influenced his aesthetic of the novel as well as the technical aspects of his work. As Bruce King comments in Introduction to Nigerian Literature: "Achebe was the first Nigerian writer to successfully transmute the conventions of the novel, a European art form, into African literature." In an Achebe novel, King notes, "European character study is subordinated to the portrayl of communal life; European economy of form is replaced by an aesthetic appropriate to the rhythms of traditional tribal life."

His works include: Things Fall Apart, 1958
No Longer at Ease, 1960
The Sacrificial Egg and Other Stories, 1962
Arrow of God, 1964
A Man of the People, 1966
Chike and the River, 1966
Beware, Soul-Brother, and Other Poems, 1971
How the Leopard Got His Claws (with John Iroaganachi), 1972
Girls at War, 1973
Christmas at Biafra, and Other Poems, 1973
Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975
The Flute, 1975
The Drum, 1978
Don't Let Him Die: An Anthology of Memorial Poems for Christofer Okigbo (editor with Dubem Okafor), 1978
Aka Weta: An Anthology of Igbo Poetry (co-editor), 1982
The Trouble With Nigeria, 1984
African Short Stories, 1984
Anthills of the Savannah, 1988
Hopes and Impediments, 1988
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Apart from the afore mentioned Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, some other Nigerian writer are Ken Saro Wira and Chris Abani. I also suggest reading Ngugi Wa Thiongo.

thanks Motik, I'll post a bio of them in the profile sections next time I update.

I'm going to hear this author give a talk in Sydney about his book.

UZODINMA IWEALA

Born in 1982, Uzodinma Iweala studied at Harvard University and has won a number of prizes for his writing.

His extraordinary first novel, Beasts of No Nation is a young boy's account of his experience as a solider in a brutal civil war in an anonymous African country.
Iweala lives in Washingon, DC, and Lagos, Nigeria.
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MARC-CHARLES NICOLAS

Marc-Charles Nicolas was born in Port-de-Paix, Haiti. He had long been an avid reader of poetry and a lover of literature. After graduating high school in 1990 at College Jean Price-Mars in Haiti, he went on to finish his bachelors degree in Agricultural Engineering/Management at the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico in 1995. A certain hunger for knowledge and opportunities drove him to the USA after his time in Mexico. He spent a year teaching and doing research for the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and then moved on to complete a Masters of Business Administration with a concentration in Management of Information Systems at Oklahoma City University. He has worked several years as a Software Engineer for IBM. He is currently a Senior System Administrator for Perot Systems.

Nicolas discovered his nascent abilities as a poet while studying outside of his native country. He writes in English, French, Spanish and Haitian Creole and his literary language is marked by great scope and richness of words. The wild solitudes have always attracted him, and he feels the subtle spell of nature's varying aspects in the scenes around him. He later went on to write Perfumed Paradise, Poetic Dream and Soul Possession. In his books Perfumed Paradise and Poetic Dream, meanings and sounds are intimately related resulting in concentrated, sensually evocative poems characterized by assonant phrasing, richly descriptive adjectives, and witty metaphors.

In his spare time, Nicolas has quickly become a proficient piano player. He is also the creator of websites such as matchspecial.com, Haitisurf.com and Flownicx.com.
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EDWIDGE DANTICAT

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti January 19, 1969. When she was two years old, her father André emigrated from Haiti to New York, to be followed two years later by her mother Rose, leaving the young Danticat to be raised by her aunt and uncle. It was during these years that she was exposed to the Haitian practice of storytelling. "Krik?" called Edwidge's aunts and grandmothers. "Krak!" would answer the little girl until the stories became her own.

It would be these memories of Haiti combined with her deep love for all things Haitian that would influence her writing both in style and content. While in Haiti, Danticat wrote her first short story about a girl who was visited by a clan of women each night. Although her formal education in Haiti was in French, she always spoke Haitian Creole at home.

When Danticat entered Barnard College, she had decided to train as a nurse, but her ambition to write would win out and she went on to receive her BA in French literature. She continued with her education and earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at Brown University, where as her thesis she wrote Breath, Eyes, Memory (Soho Press, 1994). This novel speaks of four generations of Haitian women who must overcome their poverty and powerlessness. The following year, she published Krik? Krak! (Soho Press, 1995), a collection of short stories about Haiti and Haitian-Americans longing for political freedoms and democracy. Krik? Krak! was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1995.

She also wrote the Dewbreakers.

In an interview for NPR, Danticat said this of her book: "I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, ... poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles." (NPR) Since completing her Masters Degree, she has taught creative writing at New York University, and the University of Miami and has worked with filmmakers Patricia Benoit and Jonathan Demme on projects on Haitian art and documentaries about Haiti.
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CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic

Titled after a prison cell familiar to many of Nigeria's political prisoners and dissidents, Kalakuta Republic is a powerful collection of poems detailing the harrowing experiences endured by Abani and others at the hands of Nigeria's military regime in the late 1980s. In them he describes the characters that peopled his dark world, from the prison inmates to their torturers. While intense episodes are vividly described, it is above all a work greatly tinged with humanity and a durable tribute to the triumph of the human spirit.

OTHER REVIEWS
A beautiful work of art . . . elevates art and humanity above meanness and inhumanity.' World - Literature Today


'An unheralded chunk of authentic literature... ' - New Statesman

'A brave and challenging book...I was moved as much by what the poems have achieved as by what they have rescued from that nightmare world. Reading, I found myself in tears.' - Sunday Tribune

In 1990, 10 minutes into the production of his university play Song of a Broken Flute, Nigerian literature student Chris Abani found himself under arrest and forced to choose between his own life and the lives of all his fellow student cast members.

Abani, then 21, had already been imprisoned and tortured twice, both times for novels he had written that the Nigerian government regarded as subversive.

His first book, a political thriller published in 1985 when he was 16, envisioned a neo-Nazi takeover of the government. When a coup threatened to topple the country two years later, the authorities decided that Abani's book had set the blueprint for the uprising and jailed him for six months.

His second novel landed him a full-year stay.

The third time around, having written a play that the government found subversive, Abani was given an ultimatum: sign a document confessing to treason (which carried the death penalty) or sign the death warrant of all his friends in the play.

Abani admitted to treason and was sent"”without trial"”to death row at a maximum-security prison. He languished there for the next 18 months"”six of which were spent in solitary confinement in a six-by-eight-foot hole.

The torture he endured there inspired one of the five volumes of poetry he would subsequently publish: Kalakuta Republic, which the playwright Harold Pinter called "the most naked, harrowing expression of prison life and political torture imaginable. Reading them is like being singed by a red hot iron."

Chris Abani's prose includes the novels The Virgin of Flames (Penguin, 2007) GraceLand (FSG, 2004/Picador 2005), Masters of the Board (Delta, 1985) and a novella, Becoming Abigail (Akashic, 2006). His poetry collections are Hands Washing Water (Copper Canyon, 2006), Dog Woman (Red Hen, 2004), Daphne's Lot (Red Hen, 2003), and Kalakuta Republic (Saqi, 2001). He is an Associate Professor at the University of California, Riverside and also teaches in the MFA Program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. He is the recipient of the PEN USA Freedom-to-Write Award, the Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award & the PEN Hemingway Book Prize.

Dining With Devils

Fatin Abbas, reviewer

YOU MUST SET FORTH AT DAWN: A Memoir by Wole Soyinka

posted May 11, 2006 (May 29, 2006 issue), The Nation


In 1964, in Ibadan, Nigeria, a young playwright named Wole Soyinka founded Orisun Theatre, a group that specialized in semi-improvised satirical sketches on the country's political situation. There was no shortage of material for satire: Only four years into its independence from Britain, Nigeria was already in the grip of a corrupt government that was trying to establish itself as a one-party "democracy." But theater in Nigeria--especially political satire of the kind that distinguished Orisun Theatre--was a risky business. As Soyinka recounts in his memoir You Must Set Forth at Dawn, the group's players were often set upon by progovernment members of the audience and by the police, and performances became so rife with violence that the group had to be trained in self-defense tactics.

The experience of Orisun Theatre opens a window onto the intimate and complex relationship between art and politics in Africa. In a continent of rampant and often brutal political oppression, artists have almost no choice but to address politics, whether they like it or not. Yet this very involvement renders them vulnerable to the violence of the state. This is especially true for writers, whose medium is language and whose powers of advocacy, therefore, pose a particular threat to autocracy. While modern African writers began writing in the shadow of, and often in response to, colonialism, independence posed its own dilemmas. In much of Africa independence did not, as had been hoped, herald a new age of liberation and endless opportunity. The faraway colonial enemy was simply replaced by a near enemy, the African dictator. Thus many African writers found themselves living under conditions that were so repressive that the act of writing itself inevitably became a politically charged--and dangerous--activity. Writers such as the Guinean Camara Laye, the Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong'o and the Cameroonian René Philombe, among many others, have been censored, harassed and even imprisoned because of their work.

Political oppression not only threatened the writer's freedom of expression; it also hindered the audience's ability to read. The social and economic conditions that denied many Africans access to literature and even to literacy were often the direct result of the corruption and greed of the autocratic regimes that came to power after independence. Given the extent to which politics impinged on both their writing and their audience, withdrawal into an ivory tower of art became morally impossible for many African writers. Creating art was not enough; they also had to fight for the conditions on which art depends for its survival.

One of Africa's most renowned writers, Soyinka has wrestled throughout his career with the dilemmas confronted by the African writer. You Must Set Forth at Dawn provides a captivating, close-up depiction of those dilemmas, and of Soyinka's own response to them. Faced with brutal political injustice in his native Nigeria, a country that has been under various military dictatorships for most of its forty-six-year history as an independent nation, Soyinka was repeatedly forced to assume the role of political activist. But political activism raised its own quandaries: How was the artist to plunge into politics yet also keep his hands clean of the very corruption and moral compromises against which he fought?

Soyinka was born in 1934 in Abeokuta in southwestern Nigeria, then a British colony. His 1981 memoir Aké paints a lyrical picture of the world of his childhood, where the traditional beliefs of his indigenous Yoruba culture mingled with his parents' deep Christian faith. Early on he set his mind on a career as a playwright and began writing seriously as a university student in England in the 1950s. He returned to Nigeria in 1960; over the course of the next decades he taught at various universities in Nigeria and abroad, and continued to publish plays, novels, memoirs and poetry. His work, particularly his plays, soon won him international attention, and in 1986 he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Soyinka's accomplishment as a creative writer lies largely in his innovative fusion of Western ideas and art forms with the cosmology and traditions of his indigenous culture. Thus his 1963 play The Strong Breed ties a purification rite of the Niger Delta to the Christian Passion. His 1973 play The Bacchae of Euripides fuses motifs from Greek and Yoruba mythology. Opera Wonyosi, his 1981 play, transposes Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera to an African setting. While not as highly regarded as his plays, his novels and his poetry also reflect this eclectic mélange of Western and indigenous forms. In his work Soyinka often engages directly with issues of power, corruption and oppression; it is a testament to his skill as a writer that he avoids didacticism. A prolific creative writer, he has also published many works of nonfiction, including memoirs, literary criticism and political commentary.

Spanning his days as a student in England in the 1950s to his recent misadventures with the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha, You Must Set Forth at Dawn is much more than a memoir. It is also the chronicle of a nation's history, encompassing all the milestones in Nigeria's turbulent past--from its first elections, which were rigged by the British in order to put power in the hands of the conservative north; to the first bloody military coups of 1966; to the Biafran Civil War of 1967-70, which pitted eastern secessionists against the north; to the 1993 presidential elections, whose rightful victor, M.K.O. Abiola, was promptly jailed after Abacha's 1993 coup d'état.

Over the forty or so years that the memoir charts, Soyinka's relationship to both his art and his politics underwent drastic changes. As a young man Soyinka had great faith in the artist's ability to inspire political and social transformation through his work. He writes that he first resolved to use his art in a politically conscious way after being disillusioned with the Nigerian nationalists he met in England in the 1950s, the very nationalists who were then being groomed to lead independent Nigeria after the departure of the British. The ardent fervor with which Soyinka and his fellow students initially ran to greet their nation's designated liberators quickly turned into dismay. The nationalists were pretentious and shallow, disdainful toward the very people they were supposed to represent. "Their version of the message of the committed minority...was, 'Come back quickly and stake your claims. The earlier you position yourselves, the bigger your slice of the national cake!'" It soon became clear to the young Soyinka that these were not to be "the transforming agents...in a process of liberation" but merely the "flamboyant replacements of the old colonial order."

Upon returning to Nigeria in 1960, therefore, Soyinka began to develop his art as a means to "propagate progressive ideas, mobilize the people, and expose their [new] betrayers." His chosen medium--drama--was effective in this respect, since it was performed live in front of audiences to which a Nigerian novelist would not have had access. Almost immediately after his return, he infuriated the new ruling elite when the run of his play A Dance of the Forests overlapped with the country's independence celebrations that year. The play was eerily prescient in its depiction of the corruption of postcolonial Nigerian politics.

Soon, however, Soyinka came up against the limitations of art as a tool of political and social transformation. In 1965 the regional elections in Soyinka's western region were rigged, taking away power from the elected party and giving it to the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), an ally of the corrupt federal government controlled by the north. The electoral crisis marked a turning point for Soyinka. He writes that the crisis,

"with its lack of alternatives, informed me with a quiet certitude that I was finally tired of dramatic sketches that, however scabrous, drew only symbolic blood from the veins of Power. Suddenly, that language of intervention...became inadequate, even self-indulgent."

The creation of art, no matter how subversive, no longer satisfied Soyinka's hunger for direct, meaningful action. So when he was informed one day that the NNDP was planning to announce the results of the stolen elections on the radio that evening, thereby making them official, he decided to take matters into his own hands. That night, in the city of Ibadan, he held up at gunpoint the station that was to broadcast the announcement, and made the station's duty officers replace the tape announcing the results with his own tape, which called on the NNDP to drop its stolen mandate, leave town and take its reprobates with it. This extraordinarily daring act placed Soyinka, who had already made a name for himself in Nigeria and abroad as a playwright, at the forefront of the country's opposition movement.

From then on, he would be drawn time and again into the country's and the continent's political turmoil. In rich, vivid prose, You Must Set Forth at Dawn depicts these numerous political entanglements: His attempt, when civil war erupted between Biafran secessionists and the government in 1967, to create a bipartisan "Third Force" that would bring an end to the conflict; his efforts, along with the writers Chinua Achebe and John Pepper Bekederemo-Clark, to intervene on behalf of a general unjustly accused of treason and sentenced to death by the dictator Ibrahim Babangida; his struggle, during the first unstable days of postapartheid South Africa, to engineer a meeting between Nelson Mandela and his political rival Mongosuthu Buthelezi, chief of the KwaZulu nation; his endeavor, in the first year of Abacha's reign, to organize a million-man march to protest the dictator. Alas, Soyinka's efforts were not always successful, and sometimes he paid dearly for them. He spent almost two and a half years in prison for the stance he took during the Biafran Civil War, a detention that would become the subject of his 1972 memoir The Man Died: Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka. Nonetheless, his growing international fame as a writer and persecuted dissident also enhanced his clout, affording him privileges enjoyed by few other Nigerians. His signature Afro--which grew ever more distinctive as it turned white with age--was recognized everywhere he went. In one episode in the book, he describes making his way through a string of impenetrable roadblocks during riots in the capital Lagos simply by sticking his head out of the car window. At the roadblocks, he would immediately be recognized by the attending guards and ushered through.

Soyinka's memoir makes clear why a writer in his position could not simply stand on the sidelines in the great battles of postindependence Africa. Yet the book also suggests the perils to a writer's integrity of involvement in the dubious world of politics, particularly the moral gray zone created by dictatorships. As Soyinka admits, to be both politically effective and ethical is not always an easy balance to strike. As he puts it, "A public cause, a clamorous need, sometimes imposes choices that appear, on the surface, to contradict one's democratic convictions and, indeed, lifelong pursuits." For Soyinka, as for any other activist facing similar challenges, it was ultimately a question of the extent to which the ends justified the means. Thus, he sometimes found himself confronted with the dilemma of whether to collaborate with the very dictators he denounced--a phenomenon he characterizes as "dining with the devil." While harassed by many of Nigeria's dictators, Soyinka was also courted by some, mainly those who sought to improve their PR image through association with him. Under certain circumstances, Soyinka found cooperation justifiable. In one of the more humorous episodes in this memoir, he recalls working with the military head of state Olusegun Obasanjo to steal back an ancestral bronze head of a Yoruba deity that had been stolen decades earlier by a German archeologist. With Obasanjo's blessing, Soyinka traveled to Brazil and managed to smuggle out the mask from the private collection of an art collector, only to discover later that the mask was not the real thing but a cheap replica of the original--itself securely ensconced within the Museum of Mankind in London.

If "dining with the devil" posed one ethical dilemma for Soyinka, the question of armed struggle against Nigeria's dictatorship posed another. "I had wrestled intermittently with the problem of violence," he writes. "To be caught up in a violent situation, compelled to respond to it, presents no agonizing choice; to initiate one is another matter." He had been compelled to use violence--or at least the threat of it--during the electoral crisis in the western region, when he had held up the radio station in Ibadan. But Soyinka only seriously considered the option of armed struggle when confronted with Abacha's ruthless regime. From the beginning of Abacha's reign in 1993, it was clear to Soyinka that this was one dictator with whom cooperation or collaboration, even of the most superficial kind, was beyond the pale. Abacha was, he writes, "the most repellent of the species" of dictators that had ruled Nigeria, a monstrous "human aberration" who stopped at nothing to secure his grip on power and to silence his opponents. (Among his more notorious acts was the execution, in 1995, of the writer and Ogoni rights activist Ken Saro-wiwa, who challenged the government's cozy relationship with Shell Oil.) The enmity between Soyinka and Abacha quickly came to a head when Soyinka tried to organize a march in protest of the dictatorship, and in 1994 Soyinka was forced into exile, secretly crossing the border into Benin.

Once in exile, Soyinka gathered together Nigerian students and workers and formed the National Liberation Council of Nigeria (NALICON), which lobbied the international community against Abacha, broadcast an opposition radio program into Nigeria and worked with other dissident groups to oppose the dictatorship. Despite the efforts of NALICON and other groups, however, Abacha continued to consolidate his hold on power, jailing and assassinating his opponents. As Soyinka writes, "A monster had reduced us, collectively, to a plantation of slaves, and the word 'liberation' could not be restricted to being a mere rhetorical device." As peaceful means of protest were exhausted, Soyinka decided that armed struggle was the only way that Abacha's regime could be effectively challenged. "To concede genuine revulsion at the phenomenon of violence," he writes, "does not, however, contradict an acceptance of its sometime necessity--and even justice." Yet Soyinka is quick to disavow the indiscriminate use of violence, especially at the cost of innocent lives. As it turned out, Soyinka and NALICON would not have to resort to arms; in 1998 news reached them of the sudden death of Abacha, who had suffered a heart attack in the arms of a prostitute.

As You Must Set Forth at Dawn amply demonstrates, Soyinka has navigated the difficult quandaries attending political involvement in Africa with admirable courage, wisdom and integrity. What the heroic self-portrait of his memoir obscures, however, is that Soyinka's political stances are not always praiseworthy. For example, he lauds Rwanda's president Paul Kagame as "one of the continent's extremely rare breed of leaders." If anything, Kagame is all too typical of the continent's leaders. While he helped rid Rwanda of its genocidal Hutu government in 1994, he has subsequently amassed his share of human rights atrocities, both in his own country and in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo. Another example is Soyinka's often quite hostile attitude toward Islam and Arabs. Soyinka has frequently expressed the view that Islamic civilization was as devastating to Africa as Western colonization--a view that is questionable for many reasons, the most obvious being that the geographic reach of the Western powers in Africa was so much more extensive than the reach of Islamic civilization ever was. But Soyinka ventures into even murkier territory when he tries to define African identity on the basis of racial purity, as he did in the early 1990s during an acrimonious debate with Ali Mazrui, a Kenyan Swahili scholar of political science at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

Soyinka had taken issue with the public-television series The Africans: A Triple Heritage, which Mazrui had made in 1986, partly because of the emphasis it placed on the role of Islam in Africa. Attacking Mazrui, Soyinka charged that "The Africans was not a series made by a black African," implying that because Mazrui had Arab ancestry (like a vast number of other East Africans) he was not a black, i.e., "real," African. Soyinka repeated the charge years later, when Mazrui objected to another television series about the African continent, this one made by Soyinka's good friend Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. This time Soyinka declared that unlike Mazrui, he and Gates were true black Africans "with no hang-ups."

As Mazrui pointed out, in defining African identity on the basis of race, Soyinka was in effect affirming the same logic championed by racists. If Soyinka was willing to discount a Kenyan as an African because of a certain percentage of Arab blood, Mazrui argued, he might as well discount the black American civil rights leaders W.E.B. Du Bois and Malcolm X, because of the European blood in their veins. Mazrui also observed that there may very well be an etymological link between the name of Soyinka's own ethnic group, the Yoruba, and the Arabic adjective for Arab, "Arabiyu," and that one of the Yorubas' own origin myths traced their ancestry back to Arabia and the Persian Gulf. The debate revealed one of Soyinka's less attractive features: a narrow-mindedness that seems to be in direct contradiction to many of the democratic ideals for which he has stood.

This is not to say that You Must Set Forth at Dawn depicts a false picture of Soyinka. But the critical eye that he turns on others is--perhaps inevitably--seldom turned on himself. Here is yet another pitfall of political engagement: the self-mythologizing of the activist-intellectual. Still, while one may not always agree with his views, there is no doubting Soyinka's courage in responding to the predicament of the African artist. Confronted with the knowledge that the pen is not always mightier than the sword, Soyinka was never afraid to act upon that knowledge, or to engage directly in the fight against political injustice. "I am, contrary to all legitimately cited evidence," Soyinka confesses, "actually a closet glutton for tranquillity. An oft-quoted remark of mine--'Justice is the first condition of humanity'--does, however, act constantly against the fulfillment of that craving for peace."

At first glance, the message of You Must Set Forth at Dawn seems to be about the impotence of art as a means of resistance and the necessity of recourse, as Soyinka puts it, to weapons "more lethal than portable typewriter and paper." Yet Soyinka's most powerful weapon has always been the eloquence of his voice as a writer. This political memoir thus ironically affirms the triumph of art. For it was Soyinka's achievement as an artist in the theater that made him a significant actor in the theater of politics, and that has earned him a lasting place in the history of African letters. Even if Soyinka's art is not as lethal a weapon as the gun with which he held up the radio station in Ibadan, it will outlive both him and the regimes he opposed, exposing the vanities of men in power.

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I'M AN ELITIST TOO.

Kwame Anthony Appiah


Kwame Anthony Appiah

Kwame Anthony Appiah is our postmodern Socrates. He asks what it means to be African and African-American, but his answers immediately raise issues that encompass us all. His principal and abiding concern is how we individually construct ourselves in dialogue with social circumstance, both private and public, past and present. He probes the complexity of this process of personal formation, emphasizing the opportunities as well as the dangers for self-creation in today's ethnically fluid and culturally hybrid world. No less importantly, he provides standards to measure the moral valences of the lives we make and then charges us with the responsibility to examine and revise them constantly.

Appiah conducts his Socratic interrogations in the language and style of analytical philosophy. The questions he poses and the conclusions to which he leads us are, like those of his ancient predecessor, often deeply disturbing, since they expose the "false presuppositions" and outright "errors and inaccuracies" of our most cherished forms of selfhood. Race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, religion, nationhood, and the multiculturalism such categories promote"”each of these he scrutinizes, finding some to be empirically unsound, many conceptually incoherent, and all ethically ambivalent.

Appiah's critique of these large collective identities is not designed to deny their legitimacy but to expose their threat to freedom and community. Whenever such identities claim obsessive loyalty and script our lives too tightly, they risk contributing to the injustice and violence of the present social order. Today's contrary"”and urgent"”need, Appiah argues, is for an "ethical universal" that transcends social fragmentation and bridges our differences. Its foundation he locates in "reasonableness" that accommodates competing beliefs and behaviors without polarizing the differences among them. Pluralism liberated from ideology"”it is this disposition that will enable an inclusive "humanism," which is "provisional, historically contingent, anti-essentialist (in other words postmodern)," yet still vital enough to animate our "concern to avoid cruelty and pain while nevertheless recognizing the contingency of that concern."[1]

Kwame Anthony Appiah is, perhaps, uniquely qualified to articulate this aspiration, since he has successfully crossed so many of the borders that divide and alienate us from each other. A child of mixed ancestry, his mother from the English landed gentry, his father a Ghanaian barrister and statesman"”both from families socially prominent and politically active"”Appiah is a veteran at migrating between alien cultures. Born in London in 1954, his youngest years were spent in Kumasi. There he attended primary school, until Nkrumah, then Ghana's ruler, imprisoned his father. This event precipitated Appiah's return to England, where he completed his secondary education in a British boarding school. He entered Clare College, Cambridge in 1972, receiving his bachelor's degree with First Class honors in 1975 and earning his doctorate in 1982. It was during his undergraduate years that he met the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who later became his collaborator on numerous projects, including the Amistad Series of critical anthologies on major African-American writers, as well as The Dictionary of Global Culture (1996) and Africana: The Encyclopedia of African and African-American Experience (1999). After his graduation from Cambridge, Appiah crossed the Atlantic, assuming a series of academic appointments at elite American institutions"”Yale (1982-86), Cornell (1986-90), Duke (1990-91), Harvard (1991-2002), and now Princeton, where he is the Lawrence Rockefeller Professor in Philosophy and at the University Center of Human Values. Appiah is also a person of multiple nationalities"”Ghana and the United Kingdom by birth, a citizen of the United States by choice"”as well, a gay man, who shares a Chelsea loft with his long-time companion, an editor at the New Yorker.

Intellectually, Appiah inhabits no less diverse worlds. Trained in the rigors of Cambridge's legendary school of analytical philosophy, he wrote his first two books on specialized topics in the field of language and logic, Assertion and Conditionals (1985) and For Truth in Semantics (1986). Three years later Necessary Questions: An Introduction to Philosophy (1989) appeared. It is a textbook that revolutionizes the genre: it divides the field into eight central topics and then explains the discipline's approach to mind, knowledge, language, science, morality, politics, law, and metaphysics. In its newly revised version, Thinking It Through (2003), the book remains the benchmark for initiating students into the complexities of contemporary philosophical thought.

But even as Appiah was establishing his credentials as a professional philosopher, he was also developing a separate reputation as an African and African-American scholar-critic. As early as 1979 he wrote "How Not to Do African Philosophy" and in 1985 he completed the first of the essays that would later form the core of In My Father's House (1992), his book on Africa's struggle for self-definition in a world dominated by Western values.

In My Father's House became an instant classic and placed Appiah at the forefront of contemporary African studies. The volume begins and ends with autobiography, opening with an account of his childhood in Asante and closing with his father's funeral in Ghana. These personal sections frame a set of widely ranging essays, on Alexander Crummell and W. E. B. Du Bois, the African-American intellectuals instrumental in founding Pan-Africanism, on Nobel laureate in literature Wole Soyinka and the Francophone novelist Yambo Ouologuem, on traditional African religion, on the problems of postcolonial African statehood, and on African art in the commodified Euro-American museum world.

But it is less the essays' topics than their arguments that make In My Father's House such an original work. By subjecting cultural issues to the methods of technical philosophy, Appiah is able to reach extraordinarily unorthodox results. Typical is the chapter on Du Bois. It examines his work through the prism of "the increasingly racialized thought of nineteenth-century Europe and America" and arrives at the conclusion that Du Bois's "idea of the Negro, the idea of an African race" unwittingly replicates the white society's "bad biological"”and worse ethical"”ideas."[2] Appiah's summary of this point reverberates through this book as well as in his later writings:

The truth is that there are no races: there is nothing in the world we can ask race to do for us. As we have seen, even the biologist's notion has only limited uses, and the notion that Du Bois required, and that underlies the more hateful racisms of the modern era, refers to nothing in the world at all.[3]

"Old Gods, New Gods," another pivotal chapter of In My Father's House, offers an entirely different perspective. Here Appiah foregrounds traditional Africa and analyzes the cognitive features of its orally transmitted religions. He argues that their assimilative modes of reason provide a constructive correction to the rigidities of Euro-American rationality. Appiah ends the essay with a startling transvaluation of the "double standard," which Western thinkers routinely condemn as morally unacceptable and conceptually contradictory. But in African practice, Appiah shows, the "double standard" often acts as a benign and thoughtful alternative to the irrationality produced by logic's application to daily life.

These pieces capture the two principal movements of In My Father's House. On the one hand, Appiah traces the toxicities that flow from Africans' absorbing Euro-American concepts, whether Du Bois's lapse into racialism, Soyinka's promotion of "Otherness," or postcolonial politicians' imposition of western nationhood on disparate tribes. On the other hand, he expresses an interest in pre-colonial African values that speak across the historical divide and suggest ways to resolve the conflicts that rend postmodern society.

This double movement projects a hope for Africa's future"”and for the world's"”that Appiah eloquently expresses in the preface to In My Father's House:

If my sisters and I were "children of two worlds" no one bothered to tell us this; we lived in one world, in two "extended" families divided by several thousand miles and an allegedly insuperable cultural difference that never, so far as I can recall, puzzled or perplexed us much. As I grew older, and went to English boarding-school, I learned that not everybody had family in Africa and in Europe; not everyone had a Lebanese uncle, American and French and Kenyan and Tai cousins. And by now, now that my sisters have married a Norwegian and a Nigerian and a Ghanaian, now that I live in America, I am used to seeing the world as a network of points of affinity.[4]

Appiah concentrates his affinity on a different node of the global network in his next book, Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996). It focuses primarily on African-Americans and is a collaborative project with Amy Gutmann, the eminent political scientist who is now President of the University of Pennsylvania.

Appiah's contribution is in two parts. An initial section provides an "ideational account of race," analyzing the history of the concept, first in the philosophical reflections of Thomas Jefferson and Matthew Arnold, then in biology, from Darwin to current research. Appiah here elaborates the theme of In My Father's House that "there are no races," concluding that the "race concept" is intellectually empty and that scientific data reveal no correspondence "to the social groups we call ˜races' in America."[5]

But logic and fact do not prevent people's routinely applying racial labels to each other, nor can they eradicate the past and present practice of racism. Appiah addresses this gap between cognitive truth and the reality of the American state in the second section of his contribution to Color Conscious.

He first returns to Du Bois and acknowledges the justness of his claim that the essence of African-American kinship lies in the "social heritage of slavery" and its legacy of "discrimination and insult." But Appiah then differentiates between "racial identity," which Du Bois designates as his people's "badge of color," and "racial identification."[6] The former is a historical and social construct created by others and ascribed to African-Americans. In contrast, "racial identification" is a collective, multi-generational act, in which African-Americans deliberately adopt the alien label, then self-consciously develop an ethnic culture to transform the badge from a sign of weakness and shame to one of power and pride.

Appiah carefully registers the movement's progress through the decades, "from ˜African' to ˜Negro' to ˜colored race' to ˜black' to ˜Afro-American' to ˜African-American,'" and declares: "I am sympathetic. I see how the story goes. It may even be historically, strategically necessary for the story to go this way." But he also fundamentally objects to the politics of "racial identification" because it constricts personal freedom by designating "proper ways of being black." Between "Uncle Tom and Black Power" he would, of course, choose the latter, but "I would like not to have to choose." We must, Appiah emphasizes, avoid replacing "one tyranny with another." He encourages us, instead, to shun prescriptive codes of "identification" and "live with fractured identities; engage in identity play; find solidarity, yes, but recognize contingency, and, above all, practice irony."[7]

Appiah is sensitive to the risks of this advice, and his more recent work refines the position he takes in Color Conscious. Characteristic is his essay, "Liberalism, Individuality, and Identity" (2001), which examines John Stuart Mill's On Liberty (1859), perhaps the classic defense of autonomy from social constraint. Mill's insistence on self-invention is close to Appiah's own, but the personal freedom both philosophers advocate poses a pair of ethical dangers: "arbitrariness" in choosing our characters and the "unsociability of individuality."[8] Together these threaten the human bond itself, and Appiah counters their corrosive effects by rewriting Mill. His argument is complex, following a conceptual path between romantic and existentialist notions of personal identity. But the indispensable element of Appiah's argument is his connecting our acts of self-creation to the quality of our engagement and care of others. This reconciliation of Mill's laissez-faire independence with the global interdependences of o