Okri celebrates a river of new African voices

04 May 2014 - 02:02 By Tymon Smith
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LONE PADDLER: Ben Okri Picture: WALDO SWIEGERS
LONE PADDLER: Ben Okri Picture: WALDO SWIEGERS

'I believe that, as Napoleon said, imagination rules the world," said Booker prize-winning author Ben Okri to a crowd of graduates at the University of Pretoria on Friday last week.

Okri, the only black African winner of the Booker, the Anglophone world's most prestigious literary prize, received in 1991 for The Famished Road, was in South Africa to receive his first honorary doctorate from an African university.

Swapping his signature beret for a mortarboard, Okri spoke confidently and determinedly to the assembled graduates about the power of stories and the rise of Africa despite the determination of the outside world to expect "too much of us".

"They expect us to perform in 20 years what it took them 800 years to do ... to do in a short time what can only be achieved over a long time," he said.

Three hours later and Okri is sitting on the porch of the university's postdoctoral research institute's building. His beret has returned to its usual place.

With the inclusion of Kenyan writer Binyavanga Wainaina on a recent Time 100 Most Influential People list, a National Book Critic's Circle award for Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a PEN award for Zimbabwe's NoViolet Bulawayo and acclaim for Teju Cole's Open City, the past few years have firmly placed African writers in the international spotlight.

It was not always so. After the generation of political, social- issue-driven post-independence African writers led by Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Wole Soyinka and others in the 1950s and 1960s, the continent's literature underwent something of a hiatus until Okri, at age 32, scooped the Booker and brought Africa back into the fold.

At that time, he recalls, it felt as if he was "the only one, paddling in this canoe of literature all by myself ... a literature no longer tied to independence, becoming a literature of its own".

Okri became involved in the board of the Caine prize for African writing to "make sure that we got voices and inspired voices across the continent and then, whoa!, suddenly they sprang up all over the continent and now there's a renaissance, a chorus of voices".

Okri - who was born in Nigeria, grew up in London, went back to Nigeria, made it as a writer back in England and still lives in London - says this renaissance is "important because people come to the continent through literature. And while literature is not PR for anybody, it attracts a spirit and these new voices, they are very different and their concerns are very different.

"It's now OK to just write about being in America, living in London, it's OK to look at the whole of the African presence."

That said, he still thinks there is a final hurdle for African writers to overcome and that is "for writing by Africans to be received purely as writing, because we still get there and yet we are always prefixed with the continent".

Okri is not sure why a South African university should be the first to honour him, but he thinks it has something to do with the outward-looking nature of South Africa - a country "self-confident [enough] to be able to look across and say 'Hey! We wanna say hello to Ben Okri over there'", he said.

Since the death of his parents, Okri has not spent much time in his native Nigeria. He reacts to the news stories that paint it as a continually bubbling cauldron by saying: "If Nigeria settles down and becomes orderly and everything is exactly as expected and everyone is on time and so on, I think that a fundamental aspect of the Nigerian character will be lost. There are nations that thrive on a certain just-about-kind-of-controlled chaos and I think I'm coming to accept that's how we are."

Although he has written nine novels, three collections of short stories, three volumes of poetry and three collections of essays, it is still for The Famished Road that most readers know him.

He acknowledges that it can be a bit of a weight to always be Ben "Famished Road" Okri, but there's no denying that the book has allowed him to make a living and travel the world doing what he loves. A firm believer in the idea that some of the greatest novels have been short novels and that "it's much harder to write a good short novel than it is to write a long one", he hopes that his forthcoming book, The Age of Magic, which will be released in October, will "pass the test of brevity".

Until then, he is hoping to spend a lot more time in South Africa now that he is an "honorary citizen", though it remains to be seen whether the Department of Home Affairs will be swayed by his belief that "the world's fascination with South Africa continues and not even because of the 20 years of democracy anniversary; it just continues".

"It's like we go on keeping an eye on South Africa just to see how it's doing and any news that comes out of it interests us."

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