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the fact that the distribution network, certainly in the southern African countries (I don’t imagine there is much difference in countries to the north), remains the same old colonial one. Less than a handful of distribution networks make decisions, based on the lowest common denominator of literary value, on what books should be bought from publishers, and this handful has the only means of distributing these widely to the public, since they own the chain bookstores which dominate the trade in the cities and are the only existing bookstores in most small towns. In South Africa, for example, in the twentieth century, there have been and are virtually
no
bookstores in the vast areas where blacks have been confined under apartheid.
    Another vital question: What will be the various African states’ official attitude to culture, and to literature as an expression of that culture? We writers don’t know, and haveevery reason to be uneasy. Certainly, in the twentieth century of political struggle, state money has gone into guns, not books; literature, culture, has been relegated to the dispensable category. As for literacy, so long as people can read state decrees and the graffiti that defy them, that has been regarded as sufficient proficiency. As writers, do we envisage, for example, a dispensation from a Ministry of Culture in South Africa to fund publishing in African languages, and to provide libraries in rural communities and in the shanty towns which no doubt will be with us, still, for a long time? Would we have to fear that, in return for subvention, writers might be restricted by censorship of one kind or another? How can we ensure that our implicit role—supplying a critique of society for the greater understanding and enrichment of life there—will be respected?
    Considering all these factors that stand against the writer’s act of transforming literature in response to a new era, it seems that we writers have, however reluctantly, to take on contingent responsibilities that should not be ours. We’ll have to concern ourselves with the quality and direction of education—will our schools turn out drones or thinkers? How shall we press for a new policy and structure of publishing and distribution, so that writers may write in African languages and bring pleasure and fulfillment to thousands who are cut off from literature by lack of knowledge of European languages? How shall we make the function of writers, whose hand held out to contribute to development is in the books they offer, something recognized and given its value by the governing powers of the twenty-first century? We have to begin now to concern ourselves with the structures of society that contain culture, and within which it must assert its growth.
    And there is yet one more problem to be faced by the naked power of the word, which is all we have, but which has proved itself unkillable by even the most horrible of conventional and unconventional weaponry. Looking back, many well-known factors inhibited the growth of a modern African culture, an African literature, in the century whose sands are running out through our fingers. One hardly need cite the contemptuous dismissal of all African culture by frontier and colonial domination; the cementing-over of African music, dance, myth, philosophy, religious beliefs, and secular rituals: the very stuff on which the literary imagination feeds. The creativity of Africa lay ignored beneath the treading feet of white people on their way to see the latest Hollywood gangster movie or to pick up from the corner store a comic with bubble text in American. And soon, soon, these were joined by black people in the same pursuit, having been convinced, since everything that was their own was said to be worthless, that this was the culture to acquire. The habit of chewing cultural pulp is by now deeply established among our people. And it is so temptingly cheap to be bought from abroad by our