• Mukoma wa Ngugi: a poet, essayist and novelist.
• Writer considers blind afro-optimism as dangerous as afro-pessimism

The last time you were in Nairobi, you hinted at lack of serious literary agents and publishers in Africa. How has this affected the quality of African writing and portrayal of Africa in the literary world?

 Well, a good number of us are working with Western literary agents who are familiar mostly with Western publishers. This in turn means that they are likely to represent books that will be assured a Western audience.  This means that there are good books that have Africans as their primary audience that are not being published.  But in the absence of viable publishing in most African countries, even African literary agents would have a problem. 

I think this is why we have to support independent initiatives such as Cassava Republic Press that has taken its mantra of “feeding the African imagination” very seriously.

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You also went into the responsibilities of publishers (Storymoja festival 2009) operating in Africa as corporate citizens to authors and the community. Talk freely about this.

 Well, if you consider the amount of money generated by publishers such as Heinemann and how little they have given back, you cannot but help think they are just as exploitative as the next Western corporation.  Surely, Heinemann should have set up a Chinua Achebe first book prize by now.  It should have set up a writer’s foundation that caters to younger writers even if only in the self-interest of having future writers to exploit.  Now, the argument is that like any other business, publishers have to make money in order to stay afloat. 

But I think there is also a moral responsibility, a duty even to give back when money is being made out of the talents of the dispossessed.   I mean without nurturing future generations of readers and literary critics, how else will African literatures grow?  Let us not forget that Africa is an immense continent with a population estimate of 800 million – yet how many young writers can one name?  We are in the hundreds but in reality we should be in the thousands.  We have a huge problem and the corporate publishing industry has a huge role to play in the solution.  As I said, every entity involved in the writing industry, from writers to publishers have a role to play.

Most of the Literature coming out of Africa, especially published by the big name today, is by young writers (The Caine Prize generation) in the Diaspora. Their take on Africa cannot be the same as Chinua Achebe’s and the earlier generation of writers then based in Africa and writing mostly for Africans, not for Caine Prizes. In your view, is this a good thing? Why?

Each generation of writers builds on the literature that is there, and has been there before it. This generation then takes that literature and lets it grow in different directions.  This is how we end up with a literary tradition, the constantly new growing on the backs of yesterday’s innovations.  If you want to understand the continuities and differences between my generation and that of Chinua Achebe, think about Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel. 

In Things Fall Apart, that which eventually nationalists will fight for is very clear – Igbo culture is well defined, and even though in English that the characters are speaking in Igbo.  What is at stake as the colonising culture meets African culture, and who the enemy is, and what must be done are understood rightly or wrongly, as being very clear.  Hence Okwonkwo can be categorical, he can refuse to bend and consequently, to bring in King Lear, he breaks. 

In Helon Habila’s Waiting for an Angel, what ails Nigeria is not so clear – the enemy is not as clearly defined, cultural lines not so demarcated.  The characters are in state of melancholy, they really can’t articulate what ails them.  Yes, its neo-colonialism but how do you talk about an enemy twice removed and represented by a black face installed by misguided nationalism? 

And in terms of culture, what is there to recover when our generation has never really experienced that culture? As an entity outside the colonial encounter?

So Habila’s novel cannot be realist and linear like Things Fall Apart – it is fractured.  And in order to try to make sense out of this reality, the novel has to have multiple narrators.  It is in my opinion Waiting for an Angel is the novel from my generation of writers that captures what it meant to grow up in the lazy, destructive, and stomach only dictatorships of the 1980’s and 1990’s.  These were the dictatorships led by the greedy elite that Frantz Fanon termed as “good for nothing” in Wretched of the Earth. They have contributed nothing – not better roads, hospitals, universities, schools, or national industries.  They have been good for nothing.

The rich African Idioms, wise philosophies and social systems have been out of the picture especially in what is fashioned as contemporary African writing, music, dance, literature even poetry and theatre. Where do you see this moving to in future and is it a good thing especially in the context of societies and cultural identities?

I think we need to talk seriously about African philosophy – lets debate the Ezes, Wiredus and Houtondjis.  This is where the struggle for the African minds is taking place.  I also think that sooner or later my generation of writers will have to seriously deal with the language question.  For now we are holding it at bay.  But sooner or later we will have to contend with T.S. Elliot’s maxim that a writer’s first responsibility is to his or her own language.

There are many art/culture projects around the continent that are driven by foreign funding. In your opinion, how is this shaping future African realities? Is this a good thing or should Africa go back to the drawing board?

This is a huge problem.  National cultures cannot be undergirded by foreign funding.  The problem with the African elite is that they have no sense of culture and no ambition beyond the stomach.  Western capitalists understood that a nation with culture makes better business decisions – the Rockefellers and Carnegies.  A nation with a sense of culture has a sense of what it is worth.  It can take pride in what is locally manufactured and at same time be weary of outside exploitation.  Interestingly enough, the US went into depression when its capitalists abandoned national capitalism for global capitalism, when immediate profit took the place for long-term investment within the country in not just industry but also in the arts.