For decades, American scholars have been studying one aspect or another of the African experience. From 1927 on, Professor Melville J. Herskovits used his field research and scholarly insights to fashion courses on Africa offered as part of the regular curriculum at Northwestern University. Northwestern and Indiana graduate students, and possibly others, were already completing distinguished Ph.D. dissertations in the late 1930s that were based on field research in Africa or other types of original data. What we generally mean by African studies developed at a later stage, when the scholarly interaction of specialists on Africa drawn from a number of disciplines is formalized through a structure established by their institution.

In August 1936, 4,069 athletes from forty-nine countries participated in the Olympic Games in Berlin, hosted by the Nazi Fuehrer. It is true that the full bestiality of the Third Reich was not yet manifest in 1936; the gas ovens, the slave labor camps, and the rape of Europe were yet to come. However, by that year, Nazi ideology had already been articulated: blacks, Jews and gypsies had been declared sub-human; Hitler had issed his Nuremburg Laws depriving Jews of their citizenship and civil rights; German rearmament was well underway; and the National Socialists had brutally consolidated a racist despotism.

What is called the “conflict” seems to be very old right now, in view of all that has happened between 1968, when the conflict began to surface at the Eleventh Annual Convention of the African Studies Association in Los Angeles, and the present. The conflict is older than its formal beginning, and we are no closer to a solution now than we were in 1968. The conflict is over who will interpret African history. White scholars, more than blacks, have always understood the importance of controlling history and social thought. The best way to control a people is to control what they think about themselves.

Welcome to the University of Texas at Austin, to our Symposium on Contemporary South African Literature and the Inaugural Conference of the African Literature Association. It is my pleasant duty to welcome you on behalf of our Working Committee and our numerous sponsoring bodies, particularly the African and Afro-American Studies and Research Center. I hope you will have a pleasant stay, and that you will forgive any defects in the arrangements.

I would especially welcome our Speakers and Respondents; many of them agreed to come here at considerable sacrifice, and we are deeply grateful to them.

The subject of African oral literature is so vast that it would require more than an hour to present it in an understandable way, particularly to people for whom some of its dimensions may be new or completely unknown. Southern African oral literature is even more difficult to handle because there is not one southern African oral literature, there are several. These are divided not by languages, forms, or types, but rather by geography and history. The Sotho-speaking peoples, for instance, include the Kgatlas, the Ngwatos, the Pedis, and various other subgroups. Sotho literature does not necessarily follow the history of the Sotho nation, because there are several Sotho peoples distributed in different areas who are producing their own unique literatures. So in discussing the oral literature of southern Africa, we are actually discussing several literatures created by several peoples. If you happen to know the literature of one Sotho group, you are not necessarily versed in Sotho literature. You are versed only in the Sotho literature of a particular region. This is very important to understand.

When I took on the job as local arrangements chairman (what we would now call chairperson) for the 1969 annual meeting of our association, held in Montreal, I did not expect to cater for the largest meeting in our history. Nor was I really prepared for the historic occasion that it was. Of course there had been rumblings the previous year, for after all that was the time when we were still involved with various confrontations. Today the excitement has gone, we are now all very inward looking, and it is rather difficult to tell what, if anything, lingers from those days. But historic occasion it was, of that there is no doubt. Almost eighteen hundred people registered, and the program we published for the occasion is now a collector’s item. I was recently offered twenty-five dollars for a copy!

International concern with the rights of man is not new. During the 1800s the movement to abolish slavery was an emanation of this concern. In the mid-1800s the International Committee of the Red Cross was founded in reaction to the lack of care for wounded soldiers on battlefield. Under its aegis there developed humanitarian law, both the Law of Geneva and the Law of The Hague.

In the post World War I period, civil and political rights were given international protection in a series of “minorities treaties.” In addition, economic and social rights received international recognition with the creation of the International Labor Organization (I.L.O.) in 1919. Refugees received assistance with the establishment of a High Commissioner for Refugees. It has, however, only been in the post World War II period that international human rights, and their protection, have received extensive recognition.

When Lesotho approached independence in 1966, most Basotho intellectuals were confident that their country would not fall prey to the trend toward authoritarianism and the disregard for civil liberties evident in other parts of Africa. Such optimism was based on several unique dimensions of their national experience. Unlike most African states, Lesotho comprised a single people who shared common language, culture, and political identity. A long tradition of free speech and participatory government was reinforeced by considerable experience with competitive political parties and the Westminster parliamentary system. Broad political awareness, spurred by the highest literacy rate in Black Africa, enhanced Basotho determination to provide a model of stable, democratic institutions, in contrast to the repressive apartheid structure of the omnipresent Republic of South Africa.

In the early 1950s when the American Committee on Africa was formed, American interest in and knowledge about Africa was something of a joke. There was a Tarzan mentality in the US about the continent. Few books about Africa were known even by the reading public. Gunther’s Inside Africa, when it came out in 1956, served as a reference book for years for those Americans who wanted to get a perspective on the continent. I remember listening to Chester Bowles, who served as under secretary of state briefly in the Kennedy administration, speak about his own attempt to find relevant material about Africa in a Connecticut town. He told about his visit to the town public library, where he culled through the card catalogue. To find books on the Congo he said he had to search under “B” for “Belgium.” In searching for material on Ghana (then the Gold Coast) or Nigeria, he had to look under “Great Britain.” He found books about Liberia and Ethiopia under “Miscellaneous.” Knowledge of Africa was minimal, and the continent was on the whole looked upon as an extension of Europe.

I will not say much about autobiography in South Africa because it’s a given. It’s the kind of thing that has emerged naturally from South African conditions, and in fact, we are seeing it emerge all over Africa as a literature of self-definition. It has become a peculiar genre in Africa, a genre that depicts the very social conditions that have given rise to it.

My remarks this morning will be concerned mostly with the novel. This is a more problematic genre in South Africa than in other parts of Africa, and we may need a long time to debate and discuss the issues surrounding it.

Before I go on, however, I would like to add to what Mazisi said this morning, even though it is not connected with my talk. I want to say this by way of preface. Since we are talking about South Africa, we need to know that we are talking about African people rather than about ethnic groups, rather than about “tribes.”

In his address to the First Congress of Africanists in Accra on 12 December 1962, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah reminded his audience that they were united by the fact that they wanted to find out the truth about Africa, and when they had found out, they would proclaim it to the world. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah thus underscored the duality of the role of the Africanists in the second half of the twentieth century. Those engaged in African studies were charged to search for the truth about Africa with scientific and academic rigor. They were also exhorted to make known and to share the results of their research and discoveries with the world at large. African studies, according to Dr. Nkrumah, should help to create the launching pad for progressive and dynamic social policy.

The only was I can describe black South African writing is to say it’s a very tragic thing in its own way because of what is happening in South Africa. The writing seems to have no continuity; usually when we talk about black South African writing, we start around the sixties, but I think it started long before then. We have people writing in Setswana, Sevenda, Shangaan, Xhosa, and many other indigenous languages, and I’m sure that up to now we still aren’t fully aware of the wealth of literature written in those languages.

When I started writing, it was as if there had never been writers before in my country. By the time I learned to write, many people—Zeke, Kgositsile, Mazisi Kunene, Dennis Brutus—had left the country and were living in exile.

Amnesty International is particularly concerned by the following human rights problems in Rhodesia:

1. 1. the use of preventive detention, imposed without charge or trial for periods of indefinite duration ...;

2. 2. the physical restriction of released prisoners and political detainees;

3. 3. the holding of trials and detention review tribunals in camera;

4. 4. the use of the death penalty, in some cases on a mandatory basis, for a wide range of offences, and the execution, in secret, of condemned prisoners;

5. 5. the torture of political prisoners;

6. 6. the government’s refusal to establish an independent inquiry into the allegations of atrocities committed by the Rhodesian security forces;

7. 7. the forced settlement of large numbers of rural Africans in so-called “protective villages” as part of the government’s counter-insurgency policy.

I would like to start talking by reading. Yesterday on this campus, the campus of the University of Texas, as incongruous as that might seem, we had a Sharpeville rally. Some people that spoke made a lot of sense; I suppose some people that came also, perhaps, needed to hear what some of those people said. Among those who spoke was a brother I respect highly—or I should say, comrade, because brother contains no commitment—Cecil Abrahams. And this poem is called “For Cecil Abrahams.” It starts out with an epigram from David Diop: “With you I have refound the memory of my blood/ and necklaces of laughter around my days.”

As a lawyer, a law-teacher, a Board-member of Amnesty International (U.S.A.) and, more importantly, as an African revolutionary, matters of human rights are of grave concern to me. With racism and fascism gaining ground in the West, reactionary bourgeois chauvinism on the rampage in many of the newly liberated states in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, and statist revisionist tyranny masquerading as revolutionary socialism in some of the socialist countries, few can afford ivory-tower debates involving human rights. Certainly I cannot, having spent seven years in Salisbury Maximum Security Prison as Ian Smith’s political prisoner.

The letter above capsules the problems and opportunities of African studies in the mid-1970s. It suggests that American education about Africa is pitifully inadequate, and that it has a long way to go to achieve the objective of a citizenry informed about Africa and one which accepts and appreciates Africa as well as the range of cultures which comprise our modern global society.

I blame it all on the CIA.

The Africa Research Group was formed as an outgrowth of an investigation which I, as a Ramparts magazine reporter, had undertaken to flush out some tentacles of covert US intervention south of the Sahara. It turned out that identifying CIA involvement was simpler than evaluating its underlying political thrust or gauging its impact. That sort of assessment required a fairly sophisticated understanding of African political economy as well as US foreign policy. It was clear that a group effort could be a more productive way of studying this phenomenon than any individual enterprise.

Dr. Ezekiel Mphahlele spoke at the end of the session yesterday, and since there is considerable misunderstanding about at least one of the points he made, he has offered to make a clarification this morning.

Yesterday I got the impression that people left the meeting under the impression that I was trying to be an iconoclast and trying to bust things up. I am always considered to be a bull in a china shop. But far be it from me to want to bust people’s games up. Just before I spoke, my longstanding friend from the University of Nigeria at Nsukka, Donatus Nwoga, said the same things in so many words, expressing a wish that he could be back home.