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consonance with the needs of the people is the imperative for the future in our view of our literature. This is the point of departure from the past; there, literature played the immeasurably valuable part of articulating the people’s political struggle, but I do not believe it can be said to have enriched their lives with a literary culture. And I take it that our premise, in Africa, is that a literary culture is a people’s right.
    We all make the approach from our experience in the twentieth century. We all hazard predictions, since we do not know in what circumstances our ambitions for a developing literature will need to be carried out. We have our ideas and convictions of how literary development should be consonant with the needs of our people; we cannot know with what manner of political and social orders we shall have to seek that consonance.
    I think we have to be completely open-eyed about the relation between our two basic questions. We have to recognize that the first—what we hope to achieve in terms of literary directions—is heavily dependent on the second: the conditions under which we shall be working as writers. A literary culture cannot be created by writers without readers. There are noreaders without adequate education. It’s as simple—and dire—as that. No matter how much we encourage writers who are able to fulfill, according to their talents, the various kinds and levels of writing that will take literature out of the forbidding context of unattainable intellectualism, we shall never succeed until there is a wide readership competent beyond school-primer and comic-book level. And where there are readers there must be libraries where the new literature we hope to nurture, satisfying the need of identification with people’s own daily lives, and the general literature that brings the great mind-opening works of the world to them, are easily available to them.
    Will these potential readers find prose, poetry, and nonfiction in their mother tongues?
    If we are to create a twenty-first-century African literature, how is this to be done while publishing in African languages remains mainly confined to works prescribed for study, market-stall booklets, religious tracts? We have long accepted that Africa cannot, and so far as her people are concerned, has no desire to, create a ‘pure’ culture in linguistic terms; this is an anachronism when for purposes of material development the continent eagerly seeks means of technological development from all over the world.
    We all know that there is no such workable system as a purely indigenous economy once everyone wants computers and movie cassettes.
    Neither, in a future of increasing intercontinental contact, can there be a ‘pure’ indigenous culture. We see, a plain fact all over Africa, that the European languages that came with colonial conquest have been taken over into independence,
acquired
by Africans and made part and parcel of their own convenience and culture. The brilliant examples of this acquisition are thereto be read in the work of some black African writers. (Whites, of course, have never had the good sense to do the same with African languages . . . )
    But we writers cannot speak of taking up the challenge of a new century for African literature unless writing in African languages becomes the major component of the continent’s literature. Without this, one cannot speak of an African literature. It must be the basis of the cultural cross-currents that will both buffet and stimulate that literature.
    What of publishing?
    We write the books; to come alive, they have to be read. To be available, they have to be competently distributed, not only in terms of libraries, but also commercially. Many of us in Africa have had experience of trying to meet the needs of the culturally marginalised by launching small, non-profit publishing ventures in African literature. We find ourselves stopped short by